The torrent of rain and shadows spat her out on a nighttime hillside, clothes shredded, limbs tangled with her bike.
A forest? . . .
Jace managed to ease her broken helmet off but blacked out several times in freeing her messed-up leg. After, she crawled down the hill, pulling herself along by the lumpy roots of trees, forcing her way through the underbrush, into a weed-choked ditch at the side of a dirt road.
There, lying in the mud at the bottom of the ditch, she passed out a final time, exhausted enough in mind and body to die.
In the morning, traffic appeared on the road. People, dressed like cosplayers at a Renaissance Festival, passed by on foot with pack donkeys striped like zebras plodding along beside them, or driving mule-drawn wagons where the mules were the size of Clydesdales and their fetlocks were feathers, or on horseback – or was that unicorn-back? Where they came from and where they were going, Jace couldn't begin to guess. She found it oddly easy to believe that she was no longer in her world. For one thing, the grass and leafage were an odd blue-green, and the stars formed colorful swirls and whorls in the sky like a Van Gogh painting. For another, it was quiet. No thrum of vehicles on a highway. No internet videos blaring from a smartphone. No lawnmowers, or jackhammers, or sirens. No hum and buzz of industrialization, a background symphony she hadn't even been aware of because she'd been hearing it her whole life. Here, there was just the isolation, the mud, and the pain. She lay there for days as the unfiltered, too-white sun wheeled through the sky, chased by the night spangled with paint-splat stars, and the people trooped endlessly by.
Insects, immobility, and a terrible thirst tormented her; blood loss, sunburn, and a raging fever made her babble as she pleaded with the people to stop and help her. They threw insults at her that she could understand despite what she interpreted as a pronounced accent. Sometimes, they threw other things. The children favored rocks and road apples.
None helped her.
She didn't expect them to, not the Jace nurtured by a society where it was perfectly acceptable for people to avert their eyes from the sick and the homeless. Still, where she came from, the police would eventually have shown up and carted her off to jail, or the hospital, or the morgue, whichever was necessary.
Here, it was the Nightmares.
They came in the night, slithering through the tall grass, twining in the trees. They appeared to her delirious mind like half-formed mutants, both animal and human, whispering to each other in a language that was like her own, if heard through a thickly insulated wall, sinuous, sensuous, and sibilant. Lizards. Snakes. Alligators. Apes. Lions. Wolves. They crept up to her, sniffing, licking, touching, while she sobbed helpless tears of fear and loathing and pain.
Then, gently with their misshapen, clawed hands, they picked her up out of the mud and carried her away.
..::~*~::..
"An alien who cannot master the Cards is of no use to us. Kill her and be done."
Twilight, Palatium Somnia . . .
"You're the one who forced Anhell to bring her here. Why go through all that trouble just to dispose of her now?"
"I have permitted you to waste far too much time on this alien already."
Isis smiled behind her concealing mask. She did not remove her gaze from the scene in the mammoth crystal ball, big enough to encase a full-grown man, cradled in the center of an iron flower like a drop of dew. So much was at stake. So much was riding on this crippled alien, who would, if all went to plan, awaken as a powerful ally to the Nightmares. "No one asked you to stay and watch," she said.
From the glowing crystal ball, a scream of terror made Khonsu tilt his flat, expressionless mask down. A triple moon symbol, two in-facing crescents flanking a circle, glinted in obsidian and moonstone upon its brow in the light of the crystal ball and a few flameless torches.
He turned back to her. "Through no one's fault but yours the Sorceress of Water awoke too soon and is, for the moment, beyond our grasp, as is the Firelord. Twice, you have failed me. Yet you suggest I leave you to squander our resources uninhibited? You forget that my tireless work in the worlds connected to Ephemeros has amassed the wealth you seem to take for granted, which allows our people luxuries beyond their wildest dreams."
"I forget nothing," Isis said sharply. She glared at Khonsu, already feeling the heat of his attraction reaching out for her, swirling in the bruised aura that defined many Nightmares, brushing against and teasing her own. How many times must she repel his unwanted advances?
"Prove it," he said, his voice dark, commanding, and thick with desire. "On your knees."
Resistance was what attracted and excited him. Still, it would not do to let Khonsu run away with either his ego or his libido. "Perhaps it is you who forgets. I am not your plaything. And neither is she. She will be a Nightmare. Of that, I promise you."
Isis looked into the crystal ball again, holding her elbows in her palms. Across its milky curved face, trees flashed by as dark figures chased each other through the star-shadows. It wouldn't be long, now. The alien was getting closer.
"You have no idea of the riches you spurn," Khonsu seethed, ignoring the alien and her pursuers. His hand inched for his sword grip. To men like him, stabbing wasn't all that far removed from sex. "Your beauty does not blind a man completely. You think you offer nothing when you offer everything, and as such have no right to deny it. You cannot flaunt your body without giving in. You act this way because you have never known—"
"The touch of a real man?" Isis interrupted. She threw back her head and laughed. It wasn't the laugh she remembered, for it was a little too loud, went on a little too long, and its high pitch made even the man with the moon tattoo flinch. It was the laugh of a Nightmare. "Oh, I have, fearless leader, and you will never compare. Leave me. I'm sure you have better things to do, other women to seduce. Or men. Dwarf satyrs? Or perhaps hogs! Whichever you fancy this week."
Khonsu's fist slammed into her exposed middle, expelling her laughter and her scorn in a painful, bile-flavored grunt. Isis flew across the viewing chamber and fetched, with a bone-bruising smack, against the far wall. She crumpled to the floor and listened to Khonsu's iron-shod boots marching away.
After a disoriented moment, she pushed herself to her hands and knees, holding her stomach, trying not to let her guts spill out of her mouth while she wore the mask. She weaved to her feet, shaking her long brown ponytail over her shoulder, straightening her skimpy top, pulling the ample folds of her cloak closed. She wore what she pleased. She didn't need to ask permission. Nor would her attire ever be an invitation unless she said so.
Isis knew she was tempting fate, so to speak. Still, she must remember not to strike Khonsu so sharply with her words next time. He might feed her a length of steel instead of his knuckles.
A prolonged crack reverberated out of the crystal ball. Excitement coursed through Isis, shoving aside the memory of Khonsu's huge, hairy-fingered fist impacting her spine through her stomach. She hurried to the iron flower and peered into the crystal ball's misty depths.
..::~*~::..
"Protect the egg."
Third-night, Bourneyate Woodland . . .
That was the only instruction Jace had been given. She had spent the first night searching for an egg roughly the size of an ostrich's, but the textured shell of which shimmered in the colors of the Northern Lights. She found it in an abandoned nest inside a hollow tree, where the shadows hung thick and impenetrable. The egg felt like bearded dragon skin, bumpy and ridged, but light as air, as if there were nothing inside. Like a giant, plastic Easter egg.
The Card Hunters didn't show up until the second night, unclipping their lizard-dogs from their harnesses and sending them barreling through her camp. They scattered her fire, tore down her tent, and trampled her larger supplies, but she had gotten away with both the egg and her backpack simply by sitting on the ground and using a low-level Ephemeral Card, Black Hole. The shadows beneath her butt had opened up and swallowed her. The last she had seen of the Hunters were their outraged faces. She'd hoped that would be the last she saw of them forever.
Black Hole deposited her in another part of the woodland. She took Isis's advice, hitched her backpack more securely on her shoulders, and began to hike deeper in. She would be all right for a few days. Living in the Rockies had at least taught her outdoorsmanship, and the weather here seemed mild.
Striking the egg would not break it, she learned. Good thing, too, because she dropped the awkward thing several times in the next two nights, and fell on it once. Not surprising, considering there had been no daybreaks and no moon in the past sixty or so hours, and the darkness seemed to live and breathe in the woodland around her.
Not that she wanted to see the moon. It unnerved her. It was broken, as though something had burst out of its core and left the shattered shell hanging in space, a thousand times closer to the planet than the one she remembered.
She tore her gaze from the moonless sky and fixed it on the egg in her arms. A very special creature was growing inside it. A spirit of magical power, or so Isis had explained, her thick-lashed, green eyes crinkling through her mask when she smiled. If Jace could protect the egg until it hatched in its natural element – that of shadows, darkness, and night – then it would be hers.
Jace wasn't sure what that meant, but Isis and her Nightmares had saved her. Taken her in, cleaned her, fed her, given her a place to live, and tried to heal her; her left leg would never be the same again, not after the accident, but at least she was walking without support, and, she had recently discovered, could run for short distances.
The Nightmares weren't so terrifying, either. She must have been hallucinating that night they'd come for her. They were just people, outcasts trying to get by in a world that hated them and called them nasty names to make them into monsters. Their social standing reminded her of that of the minorities in her old world, the poor, the people of color, the LGBT, the other. Palatium Somnia, a marvelous palace of wishes and wonders, had become their home, their refuge. They weren't nightmares. They were dreamers. And now, so was she.
For the most part, she did not miss the life she had left behind. It had been a life of loneliness, meaningless work, and limited means. This new life was a dream come true, despite her weak, scarred leg and the music on demand to which she no longer had access. Her phone battery had run itself down in her backpack, still on her shoulders while she lay dying in a ditch. The conveniences of the Digital Age did not exist here, but so many other wonderful things did. All she had to do to keep them was to protect the egg.
Easier said than done, she thought grimly. Near the banks of a misty, black lake, the Hunters found her. They were terrible, the stereotypically rough-voiced, foul-mouthed men that ignorant people pictured when they thought of bikers, the kind of leather-bound muscle-heads who rode Harleys and supposedly would kill if someone looked at them sideways. These were the people who hunted Nightmares. These were family to those endless people who had left her to die, bruised and sickened by the rocks and feces their children had thrown at her. These were the so-called good guys, arguing about which way she had gone. Yeah, right.
As quietly as the undergrowth allowed, Jace angled away from the lake and slid down a slope that dropped away beneath the exposed roots of a strange tree, one she had no name for, its leaves halfway between needle and fan. She surfed into a pile of mulch collected in a dirt-lined dip beneath the tree's roots and then crouched there. Struggling to calm her breathing. Listening. Waiting.
The egg pulsed against her chest. Something squirmed beneath the lizard-skin shell, and she hugged it tighter in response to her immediate desire to drop the thing. Again.
Not long now, she hoped.
The night settled around her, breathless. No wind. No animals. No insects, even.
Back home, that would have meant a predator was near. Were the rules of life the same here? Were the woodland creatures hiding because of her, or—?
A lizard-dog thrust its snarling face through the tree roots and snapped and slobbered close to her ear. Jace screamed and kicked it. Her riding boot connected with its nose and it yelped. It jerked backward through the roots, shaking leaves and bark and broken twigs from the tree, while she scrambled out the other side. She slipped and slid down the rest of the hill, feeling a bit like an out-of-control kid at the skating rink, wobbling past obstacles while she tried to put some distance between herself and the pack of hunting lizard-dogs.
Their howls rose into the night. Deceptively distant.
A pair of jaws snapped shut on her damaged leg. Jace screamed again, louder that time, and plowed headfirst into the ground. The egg squirted from her arms. It shimmered like a driftwood fire on the dark woodland floor. A lizard-dog pounced on it, scooped it up in its mouth, and took off. The one who had bitten her dashed off, too, uninterested in a grubby alien sputtering on a mouthful of dirt.
"Aw, sh—" Jace swallowed the rest of her curse along with some bits of leaf mold. She rolled out of her backpack's straps and fumbled inside it for the small deck of Ephemeral Cards Isis had gifted to her. She couldn't use many, but the fact that she could use any at all was going to keep her alive.
Except she couldn't read their faces in the darkness, and the lizard-dogs were getting away. She pulled what she thought was the Iski Card from the deck and held it up with one hand. With the other, she used a small kitchen knife and stabbed it. It wasn't like she could use any of the real weapons Isis had eagerly tried to saddle her with, the bows and crossbows, slings and staves, daggers, swords, maces, morning stars, pikes, halberds, and countless other unrecognizable things. The room within the palace and its shelves had gone on and on like one of those super-secret government filing warehouses in the movies. She could cook. She chose a knife.
The Ephemeral Card didn't seem to mind her humble choice, either. However, what exploded out of it wasn't the expected, small, mostly harmless shadow spirit. An indigo-skinned imp oozed over the knife, encompassing handle and blade, and opened eyes that glowed like white flame. It was kind of cute, with its overlarge head and childlike body, pointed ears, and tiny bat wings.
When it grinned, it revealed a row of knife-bladed teeth.
Jace's mouth dried out. That wasn't Iski.
A/N: More slight changes, for those of you who have already read this far: Iskia has become Anhell (because I had forgotten about the Card naming conventions, Undi and Zini and Tinni being the lowest-level water, fire, and metal cards, so now Iski is the lowest-level shadow Card).
Reviewer Thanks! St4r Hunter. You're the reason I keep writing! Thank you!
As always, please leave a review before you go.
Cheers!
Anne