The Undead Pool (The Hollows #12)
Page 42“Landon,” I said in warning, and his smile became ugly.
“Ta na shay, eram!” he said, his anger and jealousy spilling over into his voice.
I gasped as a scintillating flow of mystics poured through me, my defenses as effectual as a sieve as they danced through the spaces around them with the sound of wings and spinning wheels made of purple eyes. I wasn’t connected to a line. I was a line, the living energy existing in the spaces between mass, chiming to the sound of my aura.
“Oh shit . . .” I breathed, and my hands clenched on the cushions as the bird’s wings stilled and it hit the table.
“Rachel?” Ivy said, leaning close, but I couldn’t see her, my vision unable to process anything as something seemed to play with my aura, caressing it.
You’ve come home. The alien thought lifted through me. Become. Tell me what you’ve seen.
“No,” I whispered, feeling the presence begin to pull me in, the edges of my awareness become fuzzy. No, I thought, and the whirling eyes of the Goddess’s thoughts turned to me, purple feathers shedding from it at my defiance to leave it unblinking.
“Get out!” I screamed, shifting my aura sideways until the mystics sort of stepped left and were gone.
I took a huge breath, head snapping up to see Bis atop the table, the spell scattered as he hissed at Landon, wings spread wide. The man was scrunched in his chair, facing down a very pissed Ivy and Jenks. “I’m okay!” I said, and Ivy turned, the relief in her overwhelming. “I’m okay.” But my hands were shaking, and I didn’t think I’d ever be able to sleep again.
“It was an accident!” Landon was saying. “Look, she’s okay.”
Jenks hovered before him as Ivy came to look into my eyes. “I might be a pixy, but I know enough magic to know that you used her hair! You meant to do that!”
“No. No I didn’t. It’s never worked before!”
Shaky, I stood up. “You need to leave.”
“But you called me. Ta na shay, eram,” a high-pitched voice said, and I spun.
“Holy shit!” Jenks swore, and I stared, Landon forgotten, at the little boy standing before me. He was in a hospital gown, ashen and thin with that ugly ID band on his wrist and pale-rimmed holes in his skin where the IVs once were. His hair had been lovingly arranged, and I recognized the amulet pinned to his coat from the morgue. He wasn’t alive, and as I tried to figure out what to say, he shuffled forward, no expression, no nothing. My middle ached, as if something was being pulled from it.
“I remember this dream,” the boy said, head down. “There you are,” he lisped, shuffling three steps before falling over and hitting the floor with a thud. Ivy reached for him, her face pale as she drew back. “It’s time to become,” he said to the floor.
Horrified, I scrambled to put the chair between us. Holy crap, it was like the night of the living dead in my living room! Jenks was on my shoulder, and Bis flew into the rafters, hissing.
I’d kicked the Goddess out of my mind. Apparently she’d found another, one who couldn’t stop her, and jumped it here. “Ah, the morgue? I think it’s okay,” I said, coming out from behind my chair. Landon was no use, huddled as if he’d never seen a zombie before. Hell, I knew I hadn’t, but I was used to things like this. Leaning over the boy, I carefully flipped him over and stared at his unseeing eyes. Sort of.
“I think she thinks I’m one of her mystics,” I said, and the boy stared sightlessly at me. Either she didn’t know how to work the eyes, or the optic nerve was already dead.
“You are,” the boy said, gaze vacant. “You’re my thought. Come home.”
Okay, I could handle this, and I moved so that his eyes might find mine. “I’m not,” I said, creeping out. “My aura is the same is all. Listen. Your mystics slipping from my line are damaging reality. Can you not use that line for a while?”
“Line?” the boy said, his motions to try to get up faltering to nothing. His eyes met mine, and I froze, pulse hammering. “You’re not my dream,” he said suddenly, and Landon began chanting half under his breath. He sounded terrified. I knew I wasn’t all that happy. “You’re the solid everything lives within. What are you?”
“Rache!” Jenks exclaimed, and my eyes widened as the Goddess suddenly tried to slip into my thoughts again. Breath hissing, I bubbled myself, shifting my aura, then shifting it again. If not for my practice holding my own against demons, I might have been lost. No! I demanded, and my face burned where Jenks’s dust touched me as I felt her soak into me, layer by layer, as if absorbing the chemicals and synapses in my brain and reading them like memory. I’m not you! I’m Rachel. Get out!
Again I shoved her away, and panting, I stood in the middle of the sanctuary, shaking. Landon was crouched by the boy at my feet, and he looked up as I took a gasping breath of air.
“Who is that?” I said, and he shrugged.
“She forgot to breathe for him,” he said. “And with a lack of oxygen, the biological processes fall apart very fast under motion. When the brain quits functioning completely, she can’t stay.”
“Then it’s over?” Jenks said from beside Bis in the rafters. The gargoyle looked totally freaked out, a pale white beside Jenks’s green dust.
“Good.” Ivy cracked her knuckles, her eyes dark and her fear of the dead obvious. “Get out.”
But a jerk on the ley line brought my head up, and I dropped back as a man in a hospital gown was suddenly standing in my church.
“You’re not singular,” the man said, clearly more animate than the boy, making me wonder if he had perhaps just died and he had a larger number of neurons and synapses still working. “You are a complicated dream . . .”
“Tink’s little pink dildo! We got us another one, Rache!”
“I am not a dream!” I shouted, amazed at how quickly my horror could turn to annoyance, and I swear the Goddess almost focused on me. “I’m another entity. I’m . . . a singular,” I said, trying to use words she might understand. “I exist in the mass that creates spaces. We all do. Now will you listen to me? Someone is stealing your thoughts. I’m trying to help.”
The man listed as he shambled forward. “They’re stealing me?” she said, the first hints of real emotion crossing her, and Landon backed to the hallway at the end of the church. “Errant dreams are holding them?” I backed up too as the dead man suddenly lost control of his feet and fell to his knees. “They take them for their own? They are mine! Mine!”
She was angry again. I was losing what little ground I’d gained. “If you could—”
Taken aback, I hesitated and looked at Ivy. It was hard to be afraid of something that kept falling down.
“You’re complex,” the Goddess said, face still planted in the floor, and Jenks dropped down, his dust glowing like a second aura. “How do you not become? Perhaps you exist. Perhaps not. You will be my thought. My thought with . . . independent movement in the mass between spaces.”
Huh?
“You need direction,” she added, and the man collapsed, the strings utterly cut.
No! I screamed, but that fast, she had me, the Goddess learning the electrical impulses of my body in a flash of insight. My eyes flew open, and I felt a surge of shock and pleasure as she saw the world through me, her first spike of confusion vanishing as she dipped through my brain and found out how to make sense of it, learning what a corpse could never teach her. She was in my soul, wild, bright, dark, all things.
“Rachel?” Ivy said, squinting at me in concern. Jenks watched, horrified, as she iced through me, seeing the world through her thousand eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but the Goddess’s attention was upon the pixies as she calculated the flow of dust by taking in the air currents and heat patterns. Struggling, I tried again. Landon had crept back out of the hallway, smiling wickedly. Feeling my surge of anger, the Goddess fixed on him.
“You’re a wicked trickster,” I said, but it was the Goddess speaking, and Jenks moaned. Through her, I could see Landon’s betrayal, see his thoughts like the aura spilling from his soul. It had been my hair in the charm. He’d done this knowing she’d eventually take me over, destroy me like the splinter had destroyed Bancroft. He’d convinced Bancroft to do this same thing, I thought, remembering that same glint of satisfaction in him at the top of the FIB building. He murdered Bancroft as surely as if he had slit his throat. God, I had been stupid!
It was Landon, I suddenly realized. Landon was the one helping the Free Vampires eliminate the undead. Landon was a master of wild magic, and he was using them to kill all the master vampires. Bancroft. Trent. All of us were pawns in his game.
“Rachel?”
But a pawn could become a queen if she reached the end and came back again.
Wavering slightly, I turned to Ivy, feeling the Goddess’s attention fracture a hundred different directions to leave me free to breathe and speak. “Um, maybe?” I whispered.
Jenks darted up, frantic. “Rache, she’s in you!” he said. “Kick her out!”
But I couldn’t. She had dug her claws in deep, enjoying seeing mass in a way she never dreamed was real.
You are as I, she thought. But so small. A single identity that holds thousands of thoughts instead of a thousand thoughts holding a single identity. Mass can’t do this.
Her grip on me loosened more, and I took a breath, then another. Jenks’s wings clattered, and I looked at my hands. They were shaking, but I felt the awe of the Goddess in me. They were beautiful in structure, diverse in intent. I’d never noticed.
“I don’t believe it,” Landon said, and my head snapped up. His hatred was etched into his features, and I felt a tiny shock as the Goddess only now linked the facial expression to the emotion. He’d expected me to be taken as Bancroft had been. He’d expected me to be snuffed, destroyed, my single identity holding a thousand thoughts ended—and that pissed her off.
“You’re not wicked. You are ill,” the Goddess said through me.
My hand met his face in a resounding crack. A burst of ever-after struck him, and he was flung backward, slamming into the wall between two stained-glass windows.
Bis dropped down to Ivy, and Jenks took to the air. I knew my aura was wrong. I couldn’t feel Bis anymore. Unable to stop, I walked to Landon cowering under a window. The Goddess’s eyes were whirling in me, in the line, in the spaces between. The feel of the wood against my feet was exhilarating, and I could feel the pressures shift as my weight was pulled into the earth. It was glorious, and only a fraction of the Goddess’s eyes were on Landon as he gaped at us.
Us? the Goddess thought, a fragment of her awareness seeming to enfold upon itself at the concept of two individuals acting as one.
“You are an ugly dream that should be dreamed no more,” I said, then cocked my head, delighting in the sound of my voice coming back from the rafters. Like errant thoughts, the Goddess mused, finding common ground in how sound moved between empty space and solids.
“Rachel, no!” Jenks cried out as I reached for Landon, and I managed to pull my hand back from the Goddess’s reach to throttle him. “Please, let her go,” he pleaded as he hovered before me.
“You are a worthy dream,” the Goddess said to Jenks, forgetting Landon as I turned to Ivy. She was crying, and I’d never seen her so beautiful. “And you,” the Goddess said through me, and Ivy blinked fast, catching back a sob. “Us. I like us,” the Goddess said aloud, and I felt a smile grow.
“You’re a trickster singular, Rachel Morgan,” the Goddess whispered aloud so she could hear her words come back from the ceiling. I was starting to sound crazy, and Bis had gone chalk white. “Your purpose is to make balance. Mass has meaning through you. I will dream this further and will find my errant thoughts.”
No! I thought. But it was too late, and the Goddess had yanked not only my thoughts but my body into the line.
Suddenly I existed only as a thought, one eye among thousands, but a thought that could think a thousand more, unique and alone, able to be I, and us, and we. Around me was the Goddess, her trickster thoughts aligning within me. She knew how to end dreams that were unworthy of being dreamed.
She’d let me help.
Nineteen
I was both in the ley line and not, and there was no protection bubble to mute the sensation of energy flowing through the spaces in me. Around me were the collective thoughts of the Goddess, emotion being the easiest thing to comprehend. Oh, I could hear her thoughts, thousands of them all at the same time fluttering at the edges like purple wings, but comprehending a single voice was like picking out a single note in a full orchestra. Emotions were easier, broader sweeps of feeling—and most of the Goddess was pissed.
But parts of her are frightened, I thought as a blossoming of her fear gathered closer to me as if drawn by my own unease. Suddenly it became easier to pick out single frightened thoughts, mystics perhaps, fragments of a collective mind. Doubt, fear, anger, they whispered until I felt sorry for her.
Like a failing tide, the Goddess’s fear fell away, replaced by her own thoughts of compassion for the small dreams that she’d been dreaming, lost and alone. The sudden switch from fear to compassion was a shock, and as soon as I realized it, her compassion fell away, replaced by the Goddess’s own thoughts of amazement that something could exist outside of her, that unlivable mass had found a way to support independent thought.