Marked (40 page)

"He
doesn't belong to the Coun'hij anymore. He's a child once again; you
have an opportunity to win him to your side now if you show him
kindness and are fair. Don't punish him for his past sins, that
person is already dead."

"You're
giving him to me like he's some kind of puppy? What am I supposed to
do with him?"

"You
can make him yours or you can cut him loose and let him return to
what he was. His name is Drake."

I'd
been light-headed before I'd started talking—now I felt like I
was floating on a cloud. I wasn't sure if I asked my next question
verbally or if Oblivion just plucked it directly out of my mind.

"Why
are you doing this?"

"I
was sent here."

I
weakly shook my head. "That's not what I meant and you know it."

Oblivion
reached forward and ripped a swath of material off of the bottom of
my shirt. He was surprisingly gentle, but he still jostled me enough
that it sent lances of pain through my chest. I gasped, partly from
the agony, and partly from the realization that I wasn't paralyzed.
Apparently my mind had just been trying to cushion me from the tide
of agony I'd been experiencing.

The
gasp sent another tsunami of pain through me and I lost several
seconds. By the time I was able to focus on anything more than just
the burning, Oblivion had tied the scrap of fabric around my leg,
using it as a makeshift bandage. I wanted to laugh again. That wasn't
going to save me now, not after all of the blood I'd already lost,
not with a collapsed lung. I was still going to die, all Oblivion had
done was stretch out my suffering a little.

"Why
are you here? Why are you helping me?"

"I'm
doing this because out of all that is bad in the world, there is
nothing quite as wasteful as killing."

"You've
killed before—I saw it in the memory you shared with me."

"Indeed
I have. I've done many terrible things so far in my life and I know
as surely as I know the sun will rise tomorrow that I will do yet
more terrible things before I die. Some of them worse than anything
I've done so far."

"If
you know they are terrible and you do them anyway then you're no
better than Dream Stealer or any of the rest of them. I only wish
that I had the power to stop you."

"You
do, Adriana Paige. You have had it for weeks now, but after tonight
you have it more than ever. If you want me to be stopped simply let
it be known far and wide inside of the resistance that I helped you
not once, but twice. Puppeteer and the others will see me dead within
hours of a rumor like that reaching their ears. You are uniquely
placed to stop me now. There are no other witnesses of tonight's
events. Now you must ask yourself how much of my guilt you'll share
if you don't stop me."

Oblivion
pulled his hands away from me, making further communication
impossible, and then turned and walked away without looking back.

I
wanted to yell after him, to beg him to call an ambulance, to plead
for his help, or failing that to curse him for leaving me here to
die, but I didn't have the breath to spare for any of that. I watched
him walk away and felt myself getting weaker with every shaky, weak
beat of my heart.

The
fighting from inside the building had nearly died down now, but I
could hear other sounds from further away in the darkness. The howls
of approaching wolves and hybrids were something that I'd been
expecting, but there were other sounds that I didn't recognize,
foremost among them a kind of hissing cough that made my blood run
cold.

I
could hear sirens again too, but I knew the police were never going
to make it to me, not with one or more Coun'hij kill squads in the
area. I'd be dead—from natural causes or otherwise—long
before the police ever made it to me. There was just one thing left
for me to try and do before I died.

This
wasn't how I'd planned to try and rescue Alec. None of the necessary
pieces were in place to turn him into a religious figure, and I
probably wouldn't last long enough to even find him inside of the
jungle—let alone fight and kill Dream Stealer—but I had
to at least try.

I
pulled myself over so that I fell lengthwise across Alec. As the
darkness came for me I remembered that I didn't even know how to
connect with Alec's dream. Everything I'd done inside of the dream up
until now had been nothing more than an accident.

Adriana Paige
Unknown Dreamscape

I sucked in an experimental lungful of air and not only did it not
hurt, I wasn't short of breath. I couldn't think of any better proof
that I was either dreaming or dead. All that was left was to open my
eyes and see which it was.

The
dark jungle surrounding me was similar to what I'd seen the last time
I'd shared Alec's dreams. The plants had the same long thorns and
razor-edged leaves that I remembered from before and they gave off
the same light-eating darkness, but everything felt colder than it
had the last time. My breath clouded the air before me, and the aura
of decay that had turned my stomach was even worse now.

I
dropped down to my knees and sank my fingers in the cold dirt, hoping
against hope that touching more of the substance of the dream would
make my special vision reappear and confirm that this really was
Alec's dream, albeit a darker, more chilling version.

No
such luck. The dark loam sucked the warmth out of my hand without
sparking the threads of light into existence. It wasn't until then
that I realized my left arm still wasn't working. I shouldn't have
been surprised, but somehow I'd been hoping that it would be back to
normal, that it would be healed just like my ribs and legs were
healed.

Apparently
that particular injury had been a part of me for long enough that I
subconsciously expected my arm not to work. That was too bad—it
had been all I could do to survive my last fight with Dream Stealer
when I'd had the use of both of my arms. I stood even less chance
this time around, but then again it didn't actually matter whether I
survived—all that mattered was that I kill Dream Stealer before
my wounds back in the real world killed me.

I
could feel something moving around in the darkness, no doubt drawn by
the unearthly white light I was giving off, but it was surprisingly
easy to conjure my dream replica of Alec's sword. This time I
envisioned it with the monofilament edge to start out with, and as it
flared into existence with the same clean glow as last time, I took
an experimental swipe at a nearby tree. My sword sliced through the
eight-inch trunk with only the slightest hint of resistance and I
smiled.

If
Dream Stealer's shadow creatures with their compound eyes wanted to
attack me then so be it. I was as ready as I could be.

I
closed my eyes and tried to reach out with all of my other senses. I
could feel a slight tugging coming from off to my left, so I started
off in that direction, first at a brisk jog, and then faster and
faster as the weight of the passing seconds and minutes continued to
bear down on me. It would be a cruel twist of fate for me to find
Alec but die before I was even able to begin fighting Dream Stealer.

I
started breathing hard after only a few minutes—I'd never been
any kind of distance runner and was actually surprised that I'd made
it so far before the exertion started to catch up with me. Except as
I stopped and gingerly leaned against a tree to catch my breath, I
realized that I was still thinking about things as though I was in
the real world.

Back
in reality I might be unathletic and easily winded, but there was
nothing to say that I had to be that way here. In fact, I was
starting to suspect that the only reason I'd manifested as a
blonde-haired, blue-eyed seventeen-year-old girl was because that was
how I thought of myself.

I
gathered my scattered thoughts and forced myself to envision an Adri
who was stronger and faster than the one I'd actually spent the last
seventeen years crafting for myself. I imagined hard, wiry muscles
running up and down my legs and a left arm that worked. I imagined a
me who could run for miles without getting tired, and then I
pushed
with everything I had, trying to force my vision into being here in
this pseudo reality.

For
several seconds nothing seemed to happen and then all of a sudden I
felt my mind catch on something and a jolt of pain exploded inside of
my mind. I bit back a scream and then suddenly realized that I wasn't
gasping any more. My body was different too, leaner and harder, but
my left arm still refused to respond to my will. There had been a
moment where I'd almost been convinced that I could feel a phantom
pain out at the edges of my fingertips, but that was gone now and I
didn't have any more time to waste trying to bring back a dead limb.

Now
secure in my ability to summon my sword back into existence whenever
I needed it, I banished it so that I could run without worrying that
I would trip and decapitate myself. It still wasn't enough though.
The leaves and thorns were taking pieces out of my flesh and the
faster I ran the worse that got due to the fact that I couldn't see
far enough to dodge the vicious plant life.

I
considered a dozen different solutions, everything from replacing my
skin with some kind of hard exoskeleton to trying to teleport myself
directly to wherever Alec was being held, but in the end I just
forced a clear, vegetation-free path into existence with my mind and
continued to run.

Each
change I imposed on myself or my surroundings seemed to extract a
price—an initial, heavy price followed up by an ongoing
low-level drain on my battered mind—but it couldn't be helped,
not if I wanted to get to Alec in the short time I had left.

I
let the jungle close back into place behind me as I ran, which seemed
to help take away some of the load, but I could still feel my
strength trickling away with each passing second. It felt like I'd
been running for hours by the time I started breathing heavy again,
but I knew that couldn't be the case, not at the speed I was moving,
not unless the jungle had gotten much bigger than it had been the
last time I'd been here.

My
legs were starting to burn too, so I slowed down to a walk, which was
when they struck.

Both
shadows came out of the underbrush with a speed that was all the more
incredible considering my altered time sense, but I heard them at the
last second and when I held my hand out my sword flared into
existence without any problem.

I
threw myself to the left in an attempt to get out of the way, but I
let my sword hang in the air behind me like a glowing tail that
traced the arc of my travel. The closest shadow managed to get a claw
into the outside of my left leg, but it had too much momentum to
bring itself to a complete stop before it stumbled into the
impossibly thin edge of my sword.

The
pain of the shadow's claw tearing through my flesh was strong enough
that I couldn't stop from crying out, but a split second later the
shadow fell to the ground, cleanly sheared into two separate pieces.

I
hit the ground hard, but I had enough presence of mind to let my
sword go and it flickered out of existence an instant before the
actual impact, which is the only thing that saved me from the same
fate as the first shadow. I'd known I was in for a rough landing—it
couldn't be otherwise considering the fact that my left hand was
unable to catch me—but the shadow getting its claws into me had
thrown me even further off than I'd expected.

My
head collided with a rock hard enough that I saw stars and everything
started to go dark, but I knew I couldn't afford to pass out. I clung
to consciousness with every ounce of fight I had left, and rolled
onto my back just in time to see the second shadow throw itself at
me.

I
acted without thinking, and for once my instincts worked to my
advantage. Rather than freezing up like I would have in the real
world, I willed my sword back into existence and angled the
softly-glowing tip so it took the shadow in the center of its chest,
just below the base of its neck.

I'd
spent enough time around shape shifters to know that particular
strike was a paralyzing blow. It did everything I could have hoped
for—the shadow that hit me was paralyzed from the shoulders
down—but that didn't do anything to reduce the force of the
impact as it landed on me.

For
several seconds I couldn't breathe, partially because of the sheer
weight pressing down on my chest and partially because I'd had the
wind knocked out of me, but I finally managed to roll the creature
off of me and draw in a huge gasp of cool, welcome air. I was bruised
and there was blood trickling down the side of my face where the
shadow's claws had come within less than half an inch of destroying
my right eye, but other than that I was okay and I staggered off in
the direction I could still feel the pull coming from.

A
few minutes and several miles later I got close enough to see the
foreboding stone pyramid rising out of the jungle. I slowed my pace
and forced my sword to reappear in my hand, but I couldn't bring
myself to slow very much—not when I knew that Alec was probably
suffering as he waited for me to arrive and free him.

The
pyramid was hollowed out in a way I wasn't sure was actually possible
in the real world, with burning torches scattered around the
perimeter and a pair of large metal braziers on either side of the
stone altar providing a flickering, multi-pointed set of light
sources.

I
took in all of those smaller, unimportant details in bits and pieces.
I noticed that the creeping vines were blood-red in the firelight,
and that the altar was nearly as tall as I was before my mind finally
relented and let me register the most important part of the scene.