She hopes he'll say yes and laugh about showing Killer. Johnny has carried the Malice's taint for months and never lost control of himself. She had hoped--still hopes--that if she knew why he remained unchanged, she would be able to control her own Malice.
The man with blue and pale skin says nothing, only approaches her with grace Johnny never possessed. He looks the same as the woman who massacred the Garvoy tribe: his movement is full of life, but his still face speaks death. And when he raises his arm, Shania knows what it means, knows she must move, but she stays because--because this is not real, because Johnny would never hurt her. Johnny would not hurt any of his companions.
But when he strikes, she realizes that Lady has finally claimed him, just as she did Edna. Shania scrambles to her hands and knees to unleash the altar's Will, to make sure that even if she dies, the Malice will be stopped.
A week passes to find Johnny once more a boy, at home and in his bed. His chest shows no scar. One could hardly guess that only a week ago, a knife rent the skin and pierced his heart.
Shania's fingers trail down, following the pale skin to light on his navel. His belly was once soft, with a thin layer of fat, but now it is lean and hard with muscle. It is still vulnerable though, a weak spot compared to the rest of the body, and a sudden urge draws her fingers hard against the flesh, tiny white paths marking where her fingernails dig in ever so slightly. Thunderbird knows of the belly's weakness, tells her of red-tailed hawks catching fish from the river and how their hooked beaks sink in easily to rip the guts out.
She withdraws her hand and looks away. She has one prey only: Lady. Johnny has nothing to with this now; while Lady once had a grip on the boy, the Will of Uyuni was strong enough to break it, to purge his Malice.
That may have sealed the world's doom, though--because the Will was not strong enough to seal both Johnny's Malice and the Gate.
She goes back downstairs, where the others are planning what they should do next. Their discussion plods along stubbornly as everyone refuses to say they're powerless, as much as they know it.
"Maybe that woman would know another place?" Ricardo asks.
"We already asked her," Hilda snaps.
Frank starts to suggest Zonda, but Natan simply shakes his head. If Zonda had known of a second altar, he would have mentioned it when giving them the ring.
Shania paces on the wood floor, her stomach tying itself in knots--until Mao places a paw on her arm to still her, the cat's large ears perking up. "Johnny's moving."
"He's awake?" Shania asks. Her answer comes in the form of the sound of feet pounding down the stairs--although before she can actually see Johnny, Lenny rushes forward and embraces the boy in a bear hug, so all she can view is his head and stiff shoulders. That alone makes Shania frown; Johnny usually pushes away from Lenny's hugs, but right now, he doesn't attempt to get away or even tell Lenny to put him down.
When the butler finally does put him down, he turns to face them slowly. He dressed himself before coming down the stairs, but it didn't do much for his appearance. He's pale and drawn, worn out despite his long slumber. "Sorry" is the first word out of his mouth. He remembers.
"Are you all right?" Shania asks. A half-second's hesitance, and she knows the nod that follows is a lie.
"I have to go home." And when several eyebrows rise, Johnny clarifies: "the family estate. There's something I need to check out."
"We don't have the time," Ricardo says blandly. "Uyuni didn't work, kid. Lady's still going to raise hell."
Johnny starts to say something, but then stops, his head tilting to the side as he ponders something. And though Shania realizes he's got a week of lost time to make up for, so it makes sense if he's acting a little odd right now, she's still annoyed. The Will purged the Malice from him. He's normal now. He should be acting like the determined teenager she met, not a little boy who got himself lost.
Then, he says: "I think my dad...I think he did something bad."
"Want to be a little more specific?" Mao asks.
Johnny licks his lips. "I think he might have created Lady."
"Oh my God!" Frank exclaims, and Hilda smacks him for shouting in her ear at the same time Lenny asks to know just what on earth Johnny could mean by that sort of thing and Ricardo utters something in Spanish that is probably obscene.
"Why would your father do that?" Shania demands, but Johnny is shaking his head quickly.
"I don't know. I don't have a cl--"
"What about you? You looked like Lady in Uyuni. Did he do someth--"
"Don't be stupid," he snaps. "I don't look a thing like her."
There is a sudden silence in the room, and Shania isn't sure if it's because Johnny's never spoken to her like that before, or because everyone saw the resemblance between Johnny and Lady.
Natan clears his throat, about as subtle as Ta Tanka. But it works in getting everyone's attention. "You're not certain about this."
"No," Johnny says. "I ... I had a dream about it while I was sleeping. So maybe it was just a dream."
"But you think it true."
The boy nods, his shoulders slumping a bit. "It would help explain a few things."
"If it is true, we may find out more about Lady," Natan says, and concludes simply: "We have nowhere else to go. Let us investigate the house."
No one can dispute his logic, so they do. It is a spacious house, with a gigantic foyer in which monsters gather. The air is thick with dust and Malice--including Johnny's own.
It startles everyone but Johnny when the Malice wraps around his dagger. He readily disposes of the monster swooping down at him, which resembles nothing so much as a sack of blueberry jam, then looks at everyone else. The blade of his weapon is still crackling with energy. "What are you guys staring at?" he says, looking behind him in case there are any more flying blueberries.
"We thought all your Malice would be gone now," Shania says, folding her arms. "Apparently that wasn't true." And she can't stop herself from scowling, even though she knows he'll take it the wrong way and think she blames him. It's just infuriating to know that the Will of Uyuni didn't even purge all of his Malice.
"Oh," Johnny murmurs, his expression curiously blank. "Well. No, I've still got it." He scans the foyer, his gaze falling on the demonic statue on the middle, and his lips turn down in a frown. "I don't remember that..." When he approaches the statue, his footsteps echo until he halts and stomps firmly on the floor. "It's hollow."
"We don't have a basement," Lenny says.
"We didn't," Johnny corrects him. "The statue must be to hide the entrance. I'm going to look for a way to open it." He surprises everyone when he does just that, running ahead of the group.
"Uh, hey," Hilda exclaims, "did you forget the monsters already? Wait for us!"
Shania's uneasiness increases when they find a tome with a black cover, reeking with evil. The malice did not just creep in by accident; someone invited it in. But Johnny seems undisturbed, almost as though he expected it. She only sees how bothered he is when they return to the slot they found in his father's office, just large enough to accept the foul book. Johnny's hand shakes and the book knocks into the wall twice, prompting a nervous chuckle and a quip about his clumsiness from the boy. When it finally slips in, they can all hear the statue shifting, a loud grating sound. After it stops, the relative silence makes Johnny's deep breaths all too noticeable.
"If you're not feeling well," Shania says, "you should go outside with Lenny."
He shakes his head. "This is my house," he says. "You're not going in the basement without me."
The basement turns out to be a strange place full of steel and glass and wires. It reminds Shania of the laboratories in Roswell--only this laboratory has a monster that smells like rotten eggs and stale blood. When it's finally defeated, the odor lessens, though it doesn't clear entirely. She looks over to Johnny: he's breathing hard and the harsh yellow lights make him look ill. Maybe he's going to be.
Suddenly his eyes focus on something and she walks alongside him as he kneels by a picture frame on the floor. He gasps and she looks over his shoulder, curious. It's the same picture as the photo he always carries around, him and his sister and father. Lenny's explaining, but by now everyone can already guess who's in the photo, if they didn't actually know. Shania takes a deep breath. It's a small, yet damning detail; his father must have been the one to build the lab. But she looks up and around the lab again, and she's still not sure what he used this place for.
"Johnny? Your dream was about this place, wasn't it? What did you see?" He doesn't answer at first, and she kneels by him, ready to ask again.
"We got it wrong," he says finally, and he looks at her and there is this strange expression on his face. "We've got it all wrong," and there is a quiet desperation to his voice that says you have to believe me Shania, please believe me. "Lady isn't evil."
Her throat tightens, and she's glad that Ricardo beats her to the punch: "that's bullshit. Are you insane?" Johnny's thumbs are white from pressing down on the picture as he stands; Ricardo's hands fly through the air as he demands: "After how many people she's killed, after what she did to Edna--"
"That wasn't her," Johnny insists, "she's my sister."
"Your sister is dead," Shania says, and that was probably the most tactless way to say it, but the crazy talk has got to stop. "Johnny, you said she died, she died three years--" and she halts because three years ago, everyone died.
"We didn't bury her," Johnny says quietly. "There wasn't a body. Shania, just look. Look at the picture!" He thrusts one shaking hand out, offering the picture frame to her. "Look, it's her, it's her--"
But Shania doesn't want to look because she knows exactly what she'll see. Her fist flies out and smacks the frame out of his hand, sends it spinning into the shards of glass. "No," she says. "Just stop it! Lady is a monster--"
"She is not--"
"She wants to destroy the world."
"I understand, but--"
"No, I don't think you do," Shania grinds out, "or did you forget that she's already butchered hundreds of innocent people?"
His face is pale, but he's still going. "Shania, I--what happened on Uyuni, if you hadn't stopped me I would've--and you know that isn't me, that wasn't me or else you would've killed me. She's the same as me. Do you want to kill me because I couldn't control it?"
She doesn't have any response for him. Not when she realizes she does want to kill him. She looks away from him, scans the basement. Her stomach churns as she thinks that this is the house where he grew up, and every inch of it is cursed.
"Shania? Shania." He's trying to smile like his question was just a joke, but his lips are trembling. She can't look him in the eye, because if she had to bet, her eyes are probably blood red.
"Sorry," she says, "it's the--the smell, I can't think," and it's the most pathetic excuse but she runs with it because she has to get out right now, just barrels past Ricardo and Hilda and everyone else, shielding her eyes with her hand. She feels Natan falling in step behind her as she goes up the stairs. They manage to get through the foyer without meeting any monsters, but she doesn't stop when they get outside. She gets about a hundred feet away from the house, from that womb of monsters, before she sits, clutching her knees, and grits her teeth against the tears.
She wants to kill Johnny. Not because he couldn't control his Malice, no; she can barely control her own right now.
She wants to kill him because he is Lady's, just like she knew all along.
.
AN: This took me such a long time to write and I'm sorry about that. The first part has been written for a few months, but sometimes I wasn't sure if I was going to use it. Pretty much, I just played with a bunch of ideas for chapters until I finally hit something that felt right.
I wish the document editor worked right with Safari or Opera, it would've made uploading this a whole lot easier.
Oh well. With this chapter, "Wheel of Fortune" is now three-quarters done.