22 - Echo
Bad Little Baby
I’m looking downinto the pool of water in Josep’s cave, watching Syrsee as she thinks about what Lucia just said. None of it made any sense to me. Dreamwalk? I mean, I guess I can draw a conclusion. It’s what we’ve been doing ever since I woke up. I’m not sure a real moment of reality has passed, that’s how dreamlike this whole experience feels.
But I don’t understand the technical details of this dream stuff, and Syrsee obviously does, because she’s frowning. “What?” Her word comes out as a hiss.
Lucia doesn’t skip a beat. “We’re going to dreamwalk there, Syrsee. The mirror is?—”
“The mirror,” Syrsee interrupts, “is what got me into this mess in the first place.” And now she’s growling. “Ryet and I looked into it and it took me straight to Paul. The next thing I knew I was in a bedroom being raped by evil.”
I shudder when these last few words come out of her mouth. Not for her, but forme. Because that’s how I feel too. Since the night Paul came back on New Year’s Eve, everything has changed. All of it for the worse. All my friends are gone. And I get it, they were just halfbreeds. Homeless drug addicts and worthless throwaways. But they were still my friends. We were like a family.
And then Josep poisoned my blood and fed me to them so they would die.
Lucia, unlike me, has not been deterred by Syrsee’s bluntness because she chuckles. “Come on, Syrsee. You’re not really blaming the mirror for your lack of knowledge on how to use it? That’s ridiculous.”
“Well, you know what’s not ridiculous?” Syrsee retorts. “The power of that thing.”
“I’ll show you what to do,” Lucia counters.
“Why would I trust you, Lucia? You told me to kill myself when this all started.”
I gasp. “Oh, my God.” Then I look up at Lucia, who is standing behind me in the cave—if she’s really here at all—and meet her eyes in the pool of water. “Lucia, that’s despicable. That’s like… I dunno. It’s just… the worst thing ever.”
Lucia rolls her eyes at me. “The worst thingever? Please. Look at yourselves. The two of you are living examples of worst-case scenarios. You’re a dead remnant wraith and she’s a…” It takes her a moment to find a word for Syrsee. “An… evil baby maker, to put it gently.”
Syrsee and I both pull a face. But she’s the one who asks. “To put itgently?”
Lucia shrugs up a shoulder. “Trust me, Syrsee, it can get far worse than this. Now are the two of you done complaining? Because the war has begun.” She points upward and even though Syrsee isn’t here in the cave with us, she looks up when I do. “Do you hear that? That’s Paul and Josep fighting. Ryet has already been taken out of the game.”
Syrsee gasps. “What?”
“Don’t worry,” Lucia says, putting a hand up as if to preemptively ward off an overreaction. “He’s not dead. I doubt he can ever die now. But Josep has him and soon as he can get away from Paul, he’s going to bring him back down here to do… something horrible, I’m sure. Milk him for magic, probably.”
Again, Syrsee and I make the same face into the pool of water, both of us grossed out by that prospect. Even though I doubt either of us know exactly what it entails, we can take a good guess.
And this, I think, is what pushes Syrsee over the edge. “Fine.” She sighs. “What do I have to do?”
In the pool of water, I see Lucia let out a breath of relief. I don’t know what she’s up to—she could be setting us up. But things are going spectacularly badly and at this point, neither Syrsee or I really have a choice. We have to trust her.
“Bring us over,” Lucia says. “Quick.”
“Bring you overhow?”
“Look at her, Echo,” Lucia says. “Stare into Syrsee’s eyes.”
Syrsee and I look at each other, wondering what the hell good this is going to do. But the next thing I know, the mist around me begins to collect on my skin. Within moments, the fine droplets have turned into rivulets of water and the next thing I know, I’m sliding into the pool.
Not my body, but my essence. Because when I look over my shoulder, or what used to be my shoulder, I see myself kneeling down in front of the pool, staring intently in to it.
Then I’m somewhere else. In a dark place with a swirling purple and gold mist. And when I look down to see what has happened to me, I’m… well,meagain. Echo from days gone by. Wearing a tattered Offspring t-shirt, and my black velvet bell-bottoms, and my Docs on my feet. When I glance in the mirror that Syrsee was using to see us across the mist, I have pink hair.
And even though I know it’s all fake—it’s my imagination, or magic, or a delusion—none of that matters because I feel like me again. For the first time in years.
Twenty-one, if Lucia is to be believed.
For the first time in two decades, I amme.
