I told him I would follow his lead. It was time to step up. “Okay.”
He nodded.
“To get to Eno, we’ll need a transgate.” I rubbed my face.
“You can find one at Baha-char,” Moonlight said. “It will cost you many money.”
“Wilmos has one,” Sean said.
“Would he let us use it?”
Sean just looked at me.
“Okay,” I said. “Wilmos it is.”
I pulled up a screen and thought of Maud. My sister appeared on it. She was in our kitchen. Caldenia and Lord Soren sat at the table next to her, sipping something out of steaming mugs.
“I have to go out,” I told her.
“Where?”
“The Sanctuary of Eno.”
Maud whistled.
“I know it’s a lot to ask with Arland still recovering, but can you hold the inn for several hours?”
Lord Soren squared his massive shoulders and bared his fangs in a happy grin that would give most people a lifetime of nightmares.
“Yes,” Maud said. “We’ll hold it. Dina, you might want to look outside. At the driveway.”
“Front window,” I murmured and the screen changed into the image of the street. On it, a black and white cruiser sat parked at the mouth of the Avalon subdivision. Two figures in gray hoodies stood on the sidewalk. Officer Marais loomed over them.
Oh no.
“Enlarge.”
The screen grew to take up half the wall.
“…in violation of Article 3, Subsections 1 through 3, 7, 12, and 16 of the Earth Treaty,” Officer Marais said with methodical precision. “You’re endangering Earth’s neutral status by facilitating the discovery of outside civilizations and contributing to a breach of said Article which will result in a permanent ban of your species from this waypoint. Move along.”
The two Draziri made no effort to move.
A truck drove by, followed by a Ford Explorer. Nobody paid the scene any mind. The presence of a black and white was like magic - everyone concentrated on driving under the speed limit and punctuating their stops at the stop signs.
Officer Marais sighed and pulled a metal baton out. It snapped open in his hand, individual parts moving and sliding to reveal an inner core of golden light. I almost did a double take. The two Draziri froze.
“Disperse,” he ordered.
The hooded killers spun around and sped off down the sidewalk.
“Sean Evans?” I asked. “How did Officer Marais get his hands on a subatomic vaporizer?”
Sean smiled.
* * *
We slipped into the streets of Baha-char wrapped in two nondescript brown cloaks. The day had come to an end and a short Baha-char night was just around the corner. Lights ignited on the terraces, some golden, some white, others lavender and blue. Garlands of tiny lanterns traced the contours of the stalls and elaborate lamps marked the entrances to the shops, each lamp more odd than the last. The trading was still in full swing. Life at Baha-char never stopped.
We turned the corner and blended with the multicolored crocodile of shoppers crawling through the street.
“So. An errand, huh? You gave him a subatomic vaporizer.”
“He’s a cop. He enforces the law. He can’t enforce it if he’s hopelessly outgunned.”
“You gave him a weapon that can turn any living creature into a cloud of gas. Where did you even get a subatomic vaporizer?”
“I gave it to him because he won’t use it unless he absolutely has to.”
Nice how he ignored the question. “What if he gets confused and accidentally vaporizes his wife? Or himself?”
“How do you know he has a wife?”
“She has a knitting blog. I follow it. Stop ducking my questions. They have two kids. What if they find the vaporizer?”
“Marais knows how to store his weapons properly. I keyed the vaporizer to his DNA and his thumb print. It’s double locked. It’s almost impossible to accidentally discharge it. It operates on a telepathic link via an implant, so he would have to actively imagine someone blowing up for it to discharge. If one of his cop buddies finds it, they’ll think it’s just a novelty nightstick. A child can pick it up and whack baseballs with it all day and there is zero chance of it discharging.”
Sean put his hand on my elbow and sped up.
“Are we being followed?”
“Yes.”
“Draziri?”
“Yes.”
“Did you actually put an implant into Officer Marais?”
“Yes.”
“Sean!”
“It’s a two-millimeter organic implant. It’s in his scalp.”
“What if he has to undergo an MRI because he has a concussion?”
“It’s organic. It won’t show up. Stop being a negative Nancy.”
We wove through the crowd.
“I’m not a negative Nancy.”
“You’re just mad because I didn’t tell you about it.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Oh baby, I do all sorts of things I don’t tell you about.”
Ass. “Is that so?”
“Yep.”
We were almost running now. Sean’s eyes flashed amber. A dark line of tattoos crawled up his neck under the skin, shielding vital points.
“I have to maintain an air of mystery. Chicks dig a man of mystery.”
“You don’t say.”
“You know what else chicks dig?”
“Subatomic vaporizers?”
“And werewolves. Chicks really dig werewolves.”
“Poor you, having to smack all of those chicks off with a flyswatter just to walk down the street.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” He glanced back, scanning the street. “I know it’s very difficult, Dina, but try to resist me. We’re being chased and all.”
“Are there a lot of Draziri chasing us?”
He nodded.
“How many?”
“Too many. We need to run now.”
We sprinted.
Ahead a single blue lantern illuminated the entrance to Wilmos’ shop.
We burst through the door and stopped.
The shop was full of werewolves. Grizzled, dressed in leather and dark clothes, they lounged in the chairs, drinking. A table to one side held baki, a wargame played on a large board with armies of glittering rocks. We’d run headfirst into a mercenary convention.
Sean moved in front of me on liquid joints.
“Is that him?” someone asked.
“Yes,” Wilmos said from the right, where he was leaning against the counter. “That’s him.”
The werewolves looked at Sean. Sean looked at the werewolves. Everyone seemed calm, like nothing important was happening.
“What do you need?” Wilmos asked.
“Transgate. I’m taking my girlfriend to the Sanctuary of Eno.”
He said I was his girlfriend.
Sean’s voice was measured and casual. “We need some alone time but it’s almost impossible for us to get away.”
“What’s the galaxy coming to?” someone quipped from the back.
“Something on your tail?” Wilmos asked.
“Draziri,” Sean said.
“How many?” someone else asked.
“Twenty-three,” he said.
“ETA?” an older female werewolf asked.
“Forty seconds,” Sean said.
A massive dark-skinned werewolf gave an exaggerated sigh. “If only we had some weapons…”
Wilmos hit a switch on the counter. The walls spun around, displaying hundreds of weapons in every shape and style imaginable. The werewolves bared their teeth.
“Well, look at that,” the older female werewolf said. “So many lovely toys.”
Wilmos nodded toward the back room. Sean took my hand and pulled me through the room to the back.
“Hey, alpha. Let’s see it,” the older werewolf called.
Sean paused to glance at her.
“They won’t let you into Eno in your human skin anyway,” someone else said. “Let’s see it.”
Sean let go of my fingers. His body tore in a split-second and a huge monstrosity spilled out, shaggy, dark, a terrifying hybrid of human and wolf that somehow looked natural and whole.
Everyone stopped. They stared at him, and I saw respect in their eyes. Respect and a shadow of something deeper, a strange kind of longing, as if they were looking for someone all their lives and suddenly found him.
The monster grabbed my hand into his clawed fingers and pulled me to the back room, where the metal arch of the transgate waited by the wall.
CHAPTER 13
We stood on a barren plateau of dark rock. Gray boulders jutted out here and there, shot through with blue veins. Above, a night sky spread, glowing with mother-of-pearl haze, as if someone had wrapped the upper layer of the atmosphere in a pearlescent veil. Beyond the haze, the night sky spread, the kind of sky that you would never forget, alive with the light of distant stars, where nebulae rioted and clashed.
I had been here five times. I never saw the light change. It was always like this: a diaphanous haze and the universe beyond, unreachable and cold. Too big. Too vast. If you looked at it too long, it filled you with despair.
In front of us a wall rose, hundreds of feet tall and sheer, made of the same rock as the plateau. A gate punctured it. It was wide open and from where we stood, we could see that it was a hundred feet deep. I once looked at a piece of chalk under a microscope during my brief time at college. I don’t know what I had expected, but I saw globules made from circles of delicate lace, except instead of thread, the lace was crafted with calcite shells shed by millions of microorganisms. The gates looked like that. Layers and layers of elaborate pale khaki lattice in dizzying patterns, some places resembling spider web, others a beehive; yet others forming delicate mandalas. Holes punctured the gates here and there, only to reveal more patterns.
“I don’t like this,” werewolf Sean said.
“It’s a place of serenity, but not happiness. You have to turn into the wolf form now. The prophets will let you in if you look like an animal. They view animals as part of nature.”
“The gates look like jaws. With teeth.”
“That’s because they are. If you try to enter as you are, they will close on you midway through.”
He studied me for a moment. “We can go back.”
“No, we can’t. The Archivarian is in there.”
“Tell me about this Holy Seramina.”
“I met her when Klaus and I were looking for my parents. Something about my power appeals to those of Eno. They feel a kinship with me and they let me enter. I talked to three of them, and Seramina was one of those three. She’s a Kelah. Her people live in large cities they call nests. Each nest is led by the royal pair and a council of advisers. Each nest also has a holy one, a spiritual leader, to whom all look for guidance. The holy ones see into the future, but they foresee only disasters, so they can save their people from misfortune. Seramina foresaw a colossal creature that would devour the nest, but she wasn’t believed. The threat was too strange. Nobody had ever encountered a creature like that. And Seramina was mating at the time, and mating interferes with the holy one's ability to see into the future. The creature arrived and devoured the nest, eating everyone within except her. She watched them all die. Now she’s here, among others in the Sanctuary.”
“That’s a lovely story,” Sean said. “We should go back.”
“You can wait here, but I have to go in.”
He shook his head. His body blurred and a massive wolflike creature trotted over to me. I put my hand on his furry back - he was so large, I didn’t have to bend down - and took the first step through the gate. It remained open.
We walked in silence, the wolf and I. Something watched us. I couldn’t see it, but I felt the weight of its gaze. I didn’t want to be here.
The gate ended. A garden spread before us, filled with wide trees, their bark black and smooth. Each tree grew apart from its fellows, its blue glowing leaves shimmering within a dense canopy. Bulbous orange fruit hung from the branches, glowing like paper lanterns. Long silky grass, a dull, gunmetal gray, filled the spaces between the trees, spreading into the distance. No birds sang. Nothing disturbed the silence except for an occasional breeze that rustled the branches. I fought an urge to hug myself. When Homer wrote about the bleak plains of Elysium where the ancient Greek heroes lived after death, he must’ve had this place in mind.
Sean bared his teeth.
“I know,” I told him.
A swirl of tiny white lights drifted from the trees, lining up to light a path in the grass. We were being summoned. I followed it, Sean moving next to me on silent wolf paws. We walked deeper into the woods, but the trees didn’t become denser. It remained the same: a tree, some fruit, and the grass, then another tree…
We came to a clearing. A stone wall blocked the way, leaning to the side slightly, its surface slicked with moss. The lights flared and vanished.
A creature stepped from the shadows behind the wall. She was eight feet tall and slender, with leathery skin the color of butter. She stood upright on two long legs. Her four arms, delicate and narrow, put you in mind of a praying mantis or a damselfly, but her eyes belonged to an owl: large disks of blood-red with round black pupils. A gossamer tunic obscured her body, made with diaphanous layers of pale glittering fabric.
“Dinaaa.” Her voice lingered in the air, refusing to fade.
“Holy Seramina,” I said. “You called and I came.”
“You brought your wolf.” Seramina said. The echoes of her voice hung above the grass.
“Yes.”
“It’s good,” she said.
She knelt by Sean and looked into his eyes. “He doesn’t like me.”
“He doesn’t like this place.”
Seramina rose. “It is calm here. It is quiet. We have serenity. Peace. You will need peace soon, Dina.”
“I ask for your wisdom,” I said the ritual words. “I ask for your guidance. Oh holy one, tell me what danger lies in my future.”
“You will be offered that which you cannot refuse,” she whispered. “It will kill everything that is alive inside you.”
Fear squirmed through me. “Is there any way to avoid it?”
“No. It will come to pass. You cannot stop it, because you cannot deny the nature of who you are.” She knelt by Sean again, studying him. “When her soul dies, bring her here. She will never live again, but she can exist here, with us. She can be one of us, one of the broken. She will find peace here. That is my prophecy.”
She stood up and walked away into the trees.
I turned and followed the lights out. The Archivarian sat cross-legged just inside the gates. Beyond them a portal opened. Not a gate defined by a technological arc, not a tunnel, but a ragged hole punched straight through reality.
At our approach, the Archivarian rose and followed us without a word.
We walked through the tear. The universe died. There was empty blackness and then the back room of Wilmos’ shop burst into existence around us. The air smelled of energy discharge and gunpowder. The sounds of many weapons firing at the same time pounded on my ears.
The wolf tore and Sean spilled out, wearing nothing except his subcutaneous armor.
He grabbed me and pulled me to him, his eyes wild. “I’m never taking you back there.”
His lips closed on mine. The kiss seared me and for a moment I tasted Sean and the forest inside him.
The human Sean broke free. His body blurred. The massive lupine monster brandished a green knife and burst through the door of the back room into the gunfight.
* * *
I pressed myself behind the wall and peered out through the doorway. The front wall of Wilmos’ shop was gone. A ragged gap, its edges smoking and sputtering, had torn through the storefront. The werewolves had taken cover behind the counters, firing short bursts a
t the street, where the Draziri, hidden behind a couple of overturned merchant stalls, returned fire.
Sean flashed through the room, a dark blur that cleared the gap and burst into the street.
Sean!
“Idiot!” the older female werewolf yelled.
The werewolves line erupted with shots, as they tried to provide cover fire.
Wilmos smiled.
Somehow Sean cleared the fifty yards separating him from the overturned stalls. He leapt over the left one. Shots rang out.
“Hold your fire,” the grizzled dark-skinned werewolf barked.
Across the street someone screamed, a desperate terrified shriek, cut off in mid-note.
A clump of fighters in pale Draziri cloaks burst from between the two stalls, bouncing up and down the street like an out of control spin top.
“I hope you got a DNA sample before they cut him to pieces,” a blond male werewolf said.
“Watch,” Wilmos said.
The clump spun, the spaces between bodies opening for a moment, and within its depth Sean moved, lightning quick. He struck, his movements short, precise, yet fluid, cutting, stabbing, severing, fast, so fast. Each vicious swipe of his knife drew blood. He was cutting the Draziri like they were mannequins standing still. Dark stains splayed over his body, turning his fur nearly black, sliding left to shield the stomach, then up to his neck to ward off a strike. It must’ve been his subcutaneous armor.
“Will you look at that…” someone murmured.
The Draziri tried to cut him down, but he moved among them, slicing them out of existence and moving on before they had a chance to fall. A dancer on the edge of a blade.
There was a desperate need about the way he moved, as if he was trying to rend the fabric of reality to pieces. He loved me, I realized. He loved me so much, and the wounds of Nexus had barely scabbed over. The prophecy had pushed him over the edge. He had to vent or it would tear him apart from the inside out.
The werewolves stood up. They were watching him with those odd longing expressions on their faces. Something was taking place among them, something I didn’t quite understand.
Wilmos pulled a translucent datapad off the wall. His fingers danced across it.