Shimmer: A Novel (40 page)

“Logan,” Thalia called as she hurried around the pretzel kiosk toward the overturned table. Logan rose from his crouched position and saw Thalia holding something toward him, dangling from her fingers: the protective amulet he’d given her the previous night. “Take this. Find Liana. Bring her home.”

“How?” Logan asked desperately.

Thalia pressed her other hand to her forehead, wincing in obvious pain. The blue electricity swirling and crackling around her body might have been responsible for her discomfort. But Logan worried that her time out of the darkness was leaking away.

“Take Fallon. She’ll boost you. Douse for them.”

“We don’t know if she’s alive,” Logan said. “I should stay here to he—”

“She
is
alive, Logan. I sense her now. Through the rift. But when we destroy Carnifex, it may close forever. We can’t lose her—them. Bring them back. Hurry!”

“O-okay,” Logan said nervously, taking the amulet gingerly from her sparkling fingers. He felt a slight tingling sensation, nothing more. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“I said your time would come, Logan,” Thalia said, grimacing with another wave of pain. “This is it. Now go!”

He nodded, tried to swallow but his throat was too dry. To present a poor target for Carnifex’s wrath, Logan stayed low as he caught Fallon’s hand and said, “Show time.”

“What?”

“Follow me!”

They dashed toward the shimmering rift, which hovered a foot in the air like a pulsing bruise where the carousel had stood. Logan caught a glimpse of Gideon swinging his sword and dodging a mighty axe blow. The lights flickered and dimmed again. A third lightning bolt erupted, slamming into Carnifex’s back and scorching away one of the tortured human faces sewn into his vest.

“Logan, are you sure you know what—”

Before Fallon could finish voicing her concern, he pulled her through the fold in reality, exchanging hell on earth for another hell altogether.

Chapter 51

The moment Barrett lost his arm to Carnifex’s axe, Liana knew the battle was lost. Of course, she also understood that Barrett would never admit defeat. He would continue to fight in a hopeless cause. And die a horrible death. She was not self-delusional enough to think she stood a chance against the hell lord in his own domain with her meager magical ability. She made her decision after Barrett lost his arm. She prepared her spell, which was neither offensive nor defensive in nature, but rather diversionary.

While she had dangled from Barrett’s hand over the precipice and the surging river of lava, she had plenty of time to visualize plunging to a fiery death. Indeed, the thought had consumed her for a while. So now she visualized that image and added Barrett’s tumbling body to the mix. As easy to imagine two people tumbling to their deaths as one. Then, with her forearms raised and the spell traced, she waited for Carnifex to come in for the kill, to get close enough to the edge to see what
she
wanted him to see.

The illusion was vivid but mercifully brief. One more widening crevasse among many was easy to believe, but this one appeared to spread under them, and of course they tumbled down to their deaths, consumed in a heart-stopping moment by the molten river of rock and… forgotten.

Or at least that’s what she hoped.

Since she hadn’t been able to forewarn Barrett, she lunged at him and dragged him down, just enough of a prelude to the image of falling bodies to sell her vision to the impatient demon. The image and sound of her illusion played out and she waited in silence in the faux crevasse, the appearance of which she had to maintain for a few moments longer while she desperately prayed her ploy would work.

With a hand clamped over Barrett’s mouth—unseen by Carnifex—she warned him with a fierce look to remain absolutely still and silent. In full health, he might have protested, unwilling to surrender, but apparently shock was setting in. He was pale and cold to the touch. With a weak nod, he complied.

Carnifex was disappointed in losing them to his own treacherous landscape, but he accepted that they had died and continued on his way—toward the rift to Earth, where others in the family would have to resume the fight. She waited a few minutes before dispelling the illusion. Then she collapsed with a shuddering sigh of exhaustion.

She couldn’t afford the luxury of rest. Forcing herself up to hands and knees, she looked down at Barrett lying beside her. “I can’t heal this,” she said miserably, indicating the bloody stump where his arm had been. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know if there are spells.” What she left unsaid was that Thalia and her mother might have had the ability. They would have known. Barrett should have been stuck with a better sorceress.

Barrett nodded slowly and swallowed hard, grimacing in pain. “That’s okay,” he murmured. Though he kept his left hand pressed to the stump at his right shoulder, his grip was slipping, from weakness, lethargy, the free flow of blood, or a combination of all three. “First aid kit’s under the seat.”

She smiled for him. If he still had a sense of humor, maybe he wasn’t too far gone. Of course, he might be delusional. But she refused to allow herself to sulk. She had to find something positive out of this mess. They had survived a battle with a hell lord. That had to count for something.

The ground rumbled around them, destabilizing again now that Carnifex had departed. They were the enemy here. The environment itself seemed determined to snuff out their lives. They had to keep moving. That was their only hope. If they could get out of the danger zone, past the literal killing ground, she might have time to locate the rift back to their world. She could do that at least. “Barrett, I want to try to stop the bleeding with static compression.”

Again he nodded, gulped, and said, “Go for it.” He coughed, wincing as the spasm pulled at the wounds in his chest. “My life… in your hands.”

Liana traced the patterns, cast the spell, creating a magical compression against the bloody stump, and uttered the command
“Permanos!”
to hold it in place. The compression was absolute, pressing against every severed blood vessel better than if they had been surgically clamped or sutured. She couldn’t restore the arm or heal the wound, but she had stopped the bleeding. “We can’t stay here,” she told him. “Have to keep moving. Do you understand?”

Again, the nod.

Liana dismissed her feeble light sphere, and created another one, much smaller than the first for fear it would give away their continued existence, let alone their position. The new sphere had the size and luminous intensity of a nightlight. For an added precaution, she commanded the sphere to travel with them at knee-height, where it could do the most good, lighting the way in front of them.

After placing another static compression over the chest wounds caused by the tentacle claws, she helped Barrett to his feet. “Where?” he asked.

“We’ll follow Carnifex,” she said. “If I can’t find a rift of my own, we’ll go home through his.”

They walked carefully at first, with her arm wrapped around his lower back to steady him. He held his sword in his left hand, though she doubted he had the strength to use it. Her legs felt leaden, but she had a simple strategy to revitalize herself. She took one look at Barrett’s ghastly complexion and the stump where his arm had been. That was enough to make her forget about her own aches and pains. Until he regained some semblance of his former strength, she had to be the strong one.

Weaving, and occasionally staggering when the ground shifted or began to crumble beneath their weight, they gradually put distance between themselves and the site of their illusory death. They were never in danger of catching Carnifex, unless he chose to stop and wait, but soon the ground appeared less fragile. The black rock assumed its former implacable, unyielding nature. Their pace quickened. During infrequent and brief breaks, Liana would seek a rift on her own, but she lacked the energy or concentration for success. As the rift remained elusive, she employed her
locis revelis
spell to determine Carnifex’s location and adjusted their course as needed.

After hours of walking and stumbling, she collapsed exhausted. She couldn’t recall falling. One moment she’d been lumbering along on wooden legs and the next she was looking up into Barrett’s perspiring face. “You passed out,” he said with a gentle smile.

“Sorry,” she said. Then added inanely, “Hadn’t planned on that.”

He chuckled, grimaced, and sat wearily beside her. “Let’s take a few minutes.”

As if ready to pop up for some wind sprints, Liana said, “If you insist.”

“We’ll never catch him,” Barrett said eventually. “You need to find the way out. Right here. Right now.”

“I’ve tried,” she said petulantly, disappointed in herself. “And failed.”

“We’ll rest,” he said. “Then you’ll try again.”

Liana took a deep breath. “Rest sounds positively sinful right about now.” She pushed herself into a sitting position and propped her back against a smooth outcropping of rock. As comfortable a spot as she was likely to find in hell. “It’s not as if I don’t practice.”

“What?” Barrett said, frowning. “You lost me.”

“Magic,” she said. “Practicing is definitely a part of it, but there is innate skill involved. Everyone is not equally talented. Thalia and my mother are both better at this. It’s why I’ve stayed behind so much.”

“Now you tell me,” Barrett said, feigning shock and disappointment. He shook his head and chuckled. “The ranks are thin. I get it. We do what we must. Life according to Ambrose, right?”

Liana nodded, smiling.
“Facimus quem nobis faciendum est.”

“I’ll stick with English, thanks.”

“Don’t blame you,” Liana said. “I just wanted to tell you…to let you know that my magical incompetence—”

“Hardly incompetence.”

“Whatever,” she said, waving away his defense of her shortcomings. “Not all of us magical types have the same level of ability.”

“Like an MQ?” Barrett said. “Magical Quotient?”

She laughed. “Exactly! And my MQ is hardly genius level.”

“Good enough for me,” Barrett said. “You saved our asses back there.”

“Thanks, but all I—”

Rapid clacking sounds approached from the direction they had fled. Soon Liana heard chittering mixed in with the clacking, almost like an insectile language. Barrett climbed to his feet, sword hanging from his left hand as he squinted into the darkness. “Time to move. Now!”

Adrenaline coursed through her, momentarily trumping exhaustion. She pushed herself off the cold hard ground and immediately saw what was pursuing them.

Sickly yellow and almost bioluminescent in the darkness, the creatures ambulated like spiders, but with a dozen or more spindly legs supporting their hassock-sized bodies. The undersides of their lumpy bodies split down the middle, exposing a row of chitinous teeth, which clicked together incessantly, as if eager for their next meal.

Barrett made a preemptive strike against two in the vanguard, slicing off their forelegs to knock them over, then hacking the edge of the sword into their pale bodies. He jumped back as the next few fell upon the wounded, pinning their squirming forms with their legs, while they lowered their bellies and extended fleshy, hollow tongues into the wounds to suck out the exposed meat.

Without pausing further to observe the creatures’ cannibalistic nature, Barrett signaled Liana with a nod of his head, and they ran in the opposite direction. “Doubt that bought us much time.”

“We need some separation,” Liana said. “Enough time for me to prepare spells.”

“Are you up for that?”

“Don’t have a choice,” Liana said grimly. But the thought foremost in her mind was,
I’d rather die at Carnifex’s hands than fall under the mouths of those disgusting scavengers.

Not that they’d have any say in the matter.

Chapter 52

The darkness was profound. Fallon remembered a road trip vacation with her parents, a tour of a cavern where the guide momentarily turned off all the lights to show the visitors what the cave’s original discoverers had faced. Utter darkness. She couldn’t see her palm held in front of her face. It was like that in the hell world. She knew Logan was beside her only because she held his hand. And she refused to let go. She had the odd feeling that if she released his hand, she would spiral away in the darkness despite the gravity that presently held her down. Anything could happen in that darkness. And if she was alone, anything would. She fought the urge to scream.

“How can we find anyone here?” she whispered.

Carnifex could have a twin brother standing six feet in front of them and they wouldn’t know enough—see enough—to be afraid. Until it was too late.

“Maybe our eyes will adjust.”

“How do the others do this?” she asked. “Fight what they can’t see?”

“They cast light spells.”

“You good with those?”

“Hardly,” Logan said. “My magical abilities are passive.”

“Don’t suppose you brought a flashlight?”

“In my other pants,” Logan said. “Figured the star-dagger would be more important today. Sorry.”

“Well, any
bright
ideas?”

“You’re not,” Logan said. “I mean, you may not be passive.”

“Passive aggressive sometimes, maybe, but—wait a minute! You’re talking about magic? I don’t know how to cast spells.”

“Maybe you don’t need to,” Logan said. “Magic has mostly, um, dried up on Earth, but in other dimensions it’s much more abundant and responsive. Ambrose keeps talking about your potential. Time to tap into it.”

“He said I was unbound,” Fallon recalled. “Sounds like I was into S&M, which, well, okay I’m babbling in the dark. Whistling past the graveyard. And—sheesh!”

She sensed Logan pivot to stand in front of her without releasing her hand, and she was about to ask him another senseless question when she felt his lips touch hers—slightly off-target—but close enough. Bracing herself for the sudden swoopy feeling and the tingle that chased itself across her skin, she pulled her head back to say, “Not that I’m complaining, but is now really the time?”