Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) (8 page)

His violet-colored ghost
rose up from Theo’s body. Its glowing red eyes glared at me. Its
spectral hand reached toward Ms. Crystobal imprisoned in the light.
Then it reached its other ghostly hand toward me.

I could not breathe. I
could feel my
self
being thrust out of me, all that I was, my mind, my awareness,
my being leaving from my body. Lowen was not making me one of his
Sleeper Devils. He was destroying me entirely, trying to make room
for Ms. Crystobal inside me, to make
her
into one of his
slaves.

I had wanted to die before.
But I hadn’t pictured my light snuffing out like that.

Then again, I reassured
myself consolingly, at least my death would not be like Juliet’s. I
just couldn’t picture myself throwing my life away because of an
overdose of puppy love.

Yet in the heart of this
storm of losing my self, I happened to glimpse Ms.
Crystobal.

She was staring at me
through the light of her prison. She almost looked kind and caring.
Let me tell you: That was a shock in itself.

She turned to aim the
brightness of her smile at Lowen’s ghost. But now her expression
turned to pity.

Then she disappeared. Lowen
had siphoned her from where she had been and he placed her inside
me.

The light from the pocket
watch emptied and turned dark.

I fell to the ground.
Somehow I was still inside my body. But I was not alone. There was
a Voice.

“
Are you ready?” the Voice
asked me.

“
Who are you?” I asked the
Voice.

“
You called me Ms.
Crystobal.”

“
Are you inside
me?”

“
Despite what you might
think of my opinion of you,” she said, “I have come to think highly
of who you have become. You were lost. Now you are
found.”

“
Why are you inside
me?”

“
To give you the power to
change the course of your world.”

“
What
are you?” I now
asked.

“
Think of me as a
traveller,” the Voice said. “I am not a man or a woman, as you
would think of it, although I was married once and have had over
thirteen thousand children on another dimensional
plane.”

The essence that had been
Ms. Crystobal, the being inside me now, opened my heart and my mind
and showed me all the vast possibilities in the cosmic
structure.

Then I
saw…
everything
…everything that has ever been, and will ever be, and never
was that might have been.

Ms. Crystobal showed me the
depths of black holes, the full potential of gravity and sound
waves, and the whole reality of the collective unconscious that
spreads across the Milky Way Galaxy.

“
And that’s just on your
plane of existence,” she added.

Ms. Crystobal then showed
me details about what happened when Red and I fled to the
Locomotive Deadyards, when she and Wyn stayed in the mansion to
fight Lowen and his Sleeper Devils.

She showed me how Wyn had
been captured after a valiant fight. And she showed me that she had
willingly surrendered to Lowen. She had allowed herself to be put
into his Prism Prison.

“
You let yourself get
caught?” I asked.

“
Not exactly,” she said.
“You could also think of me as a traveler of time cycles. This is
the last time-iteration that I will travel through in your
universe. So I wanted to go out with a big bang – forgive the pun.
I’ve known you before in other times and in similar parallel
realities. You’ve always been a constant source of goodness,
although in each version, you’ve always had to learn to love
yourself. You are a perfect example to the universe of loneliness,
and an even greater example of how loneliness can be overcome by
self-empowerment. And because I will be leaving your spacetime for
another one very soon, I wanted to experience this growth in you
firsthand.”

“
By possessing
me?”

“
Think of it as
squatting.”

Lowen and Nell and Wyn were
all watching me to see what would happen.

Inwardly, I spoke to Ms.
Crystobal. “Now that Lowen has put you in me, are we one of his
Sleeper Devils?”

Ms. Crystobal
laughed.

“
He didn’t put me in you,”
her voice said with a dismissive tone. “I used his power like a
boatman uses the tide. I rode the current of his power to be inside
you. But I kept you safe by my own power too. You are still in
here, and in fact you are still in control. I give it to you. Our
union – yours and mine – is a wedding that has never happened
before in the history of the multiverse, me in you and you with me.
Our power has combined, too, and it has made you the most powerful
creature that has ever existed in the countless possibilities of
creation.”

I looked around at my
surroundings. I was still in the Locomotive Deadyards. But now it
seemed so small. The world seemed like a pearl in the palm of my
hand. Possibilities opened before me like an endless row of
doors.

Rivers hummed forgotten
ancient songs. Mountains seemed as small as stones that I could
pick up and scatter across the surface of the sea. And the flowers
– oh, the flowers bespoke confidence in a great plan of love that
was overshadowing everything that ever was and that ever will
be.

“
What is this power we
share?” I asked Ms. Crystobal.

“
Try it out,” her Voice said
to me in a playful tone. “Be the girl you never got to be – that
kid in the candy store.”

“
I like cotton candy,” I
said.

“
So turn the clouds pink,”
she said.

I stood before
Lowen.

He sneered at me. He
thought I was like Nell, one of his servants, a Sleeper Devil or a
Devicanti or whatever he wanted to call me.

But he could never hurt me.
Not now. And I decided that he would never hurt anyone ever
again.

He was taller than me in
Theo’s body and he tried to seem impressive by towering over
me.

“
Kneel,” he said.

I did. I knelt on both
knees for the sake of drama.

“
Look into my eyes,” he
said.

I did that too. And I did
my best not to titter.

“
Whom do you serve?” he
said.

I said nothing.

“
Tell me whom you serve!” he
shouted in my face.

I opened my mouth. A word
came out. It floated out as gently as a snowflake. It twirled
through the air as brightly as a lightning bug. And it came to rest
on the tip of his nose like a beautiful butterfly.

“
Love,” I said.

I reached up to the
sky.

Power came from me. It
wasn’t my power, and yet it was. It was as if Ms. Crystobal was
guiding my every action, yet I was in complete control. I could
have stopped the world from spinning, if I had wanted
to.

What I wanted to do, I did.
I didn’t want to stop what I was doing, because what I was doing
was as basic as two people coming together. I was opening a door of
new possibilities. I was opening a door for love….

Okay, actually, I was
opening a dimensional portal just above Earth’s upper
atmosphere.

But that’s
much of a muchness
.

We could see the portal in
space. It was like seeing craters on the moon on a clear
day.

On the other side of the
portal was a planet that might have once been blue, but now it was
dark, almost entirely nebulous, as if the whole planet were
enshrouded in a black fog.

Lowen gasped. “What is
that?” he stammered through a tone of fear and surprise.

But in the next moment, he
and Red stepped forward together. They looked intently at the
planet. They had both seen it before.

“
Khariton,” whispered
Lowen.

Red merely stood there. A
tear welled in his eye. He had missed his home world.

Ms. Crystobal and I
together smiled inwardly.

Then I turned to Lowen and
explained, “I just sent a mental projection into every being on
that planet. It was an image of what you look like, in your human
form and in your ghost form.”

Lowen looked at me, his
eyes wide in disbelief and panic.

“
They know you’re here,” I
said. “They’re coming for you.”

It was the first time I’d
frightened a ghost.

It was a good
feeling.

And sure enough, they
did.

In less than twenty
minutes, an egg-shaped ship came from the planet, soared through
the dimensional portal, and landed on Earth.

The spacecraft looked like
Red’s, only it was sleeker with eons of upgrades.

Lowen tried to escape, but
I held him frozen in an inter-dimensional glacier, neither in time,
nor outside time, somewhere in the cracks of space.

“
Very good,” Ms. Crystobal
said to me in a complimentary tone. “I hadn’t thought of that
one.”

I was learning how to be a
good…whatever I was now.

The Khariton spacecraft
landed. A door opened in the side.

A phalanx of Red Men
marched out like soldiers. They were as tall and as muscular as
Red.

I released Lowen from his
imprisonment.

The other Red Men held a
metal device like a music box. They opened it.

Out came pretty
music.

Lowen could not
move.

But the music didn’t affect
Red or the other Red Men.

“
It is a song that has no
effect on Blood Thirsters like Red,” Ms. Crystobal said inside my
head. “Their technology has developed. The music only affects the
ghosts of Khariton. They have been hunting Lowen a long time. The
one who broke the Great Harmony deserves punishment.”

A yearning for justice must
be panspermic.

With the music, Lowen’s
violet ghost floated out of Theo’s body, which immediately fell to
the ground. Lifeless.

In a flash I caught Theo,
cradling his head, and I lowered him gently to the
ground.

“
Is he still there,” I asked
Ms. Crystobal.

“
I don’t know,” she
admitted. “Everything that I knew changed the instant I
surrendered. This is all new to me, a first in the iteration of
this time cycle.”

The Sleeper Devils and the
Devicanti were suddenly released from their imprisonment. They fell
to the ground, dead. None survived.

But there were two that had
remained, Nell and Wyn. They were still trapped in each other’s
bodies.

Lowen’s ghost seemed
hypnotized, floating inside the metal box.

The Red Men closed its lid.
They took him inside their spaceship. The engines revved, preparing
to return to Khariton.

One of the Red Men turned
and saw Red. They approached each other.

They pierced one another’s
necks. They drank one another’s blood. They spoke with one another
through their Blood Memories.

Their muscles moved with
the slow torsional rhythm of tectonic plates. Their mutual
expression was seismic.

Red broke the bond first,
pulling away from the other Red Man with sudden
quickness.

He stumbled backward and
fell to the ground. He shook his head, No! But the other Red Man
did not understand him.

The other turned and went
to the spacecraft. Yet he stopped in the doorway and gestured for
Red to follow.

Red knelt and stared at the
other in doubt and sorrow. Slowly, he shook his head
again.

The other Red Man seemed to
understand him this time. He disappeared inside the
spaceship.

The door sealed completely,
and the seams vanished, as if the door had never been
there.

The spaceship lifted off
the ground and soared back up through the dimensional
portal.

I closed the portal with a
wave of my hand. It felt as easy as conducting the musical
movements of the waves of the sea.

Red then scrambled off the
ground and he ran over to me. He picked up Nell and Wyn and he ran
with them under his arms toward his spaceship, hidden just behind
the Locomotive Deadyards.