I spun on my heel at the voice, seeing the familiar, winged shape of my childhood friend standing in the manchester section. Leander wore tight pine-green leather armour and his four moth wings flared at his back, their soft grey reflecting the dying firelight until they glowed orange themselves.
Under other circumstances, the tightness of his armour would’ve had me rolling my eyes. But, right then, relief washed over me. I’d never been so glad to see the Oneiroi in my life.
Holding my bleeding arm against my side, I stumbled towards Leander, every muscle aching, my head throbbing in time with my racing heartbeat. One of the baby blights lunged at me, screaming, and I flinched away … only to see it explode in a cloud of gore as a silver-hued bolt of energy slammed into it. When I reached Leander, panting, he gave me a wide grin even as his gaze took in my wounds. “You’re poisoned.” He shot another bolt over my shoulder. Another blight screeched and died. “That should give us enough time to deal with it.”
“What?” I stared down at my wounded arm, struggling to comprehend his words.
“Hold still. This might sting a little.”
I bit my lip to keep back a yelp of pain as his strong hands tore the shredded leather from my arm. Smoky black tendrils threaded under my skin from the place where the barbs had punctured my forearm. My head swam. “Oh, shit.”
Jaw clenched, Leander gripped my hand in his and placed his other hand on the inside of my elbow. Slowly, and with a solemn expression, he ran it down my arm. As his palm crossed over the first of the black lines, a hiss arose. It sounded like a blight bellowing its defiance. Agony shafted through me and I screamed, trying to yank free, but Leander’s other hand held me in a grip as firm as iron. I stared in horror as threads of smoke slipped out from between his fingers, as gritty as sand from a soot-stained beach. The blight had … had infected me through its barbs.
It was hard to tell in the dim light, but when the pain receded my arm looked as good as new. Leander released me and wiped his hand clean on a beach towel, wrinkling his nose. Then he brushed his fingers through my hair, healing the swelling bruise with a thought. Compared to the first pain, I barely noticed.
“You said it might sting,” I croaked, flexing my fingers. His grip had left them feeling achy.
He peered past me, looking around and then up at the breeder blight. The ceiling had fallen back into shadow, the last of my flames extinguished, and Leander sent a ball of silver energy to hover high in the air. The cool glow revealed that several more pustules were swelling, ready to burst. “I may have understated the truth a little,” he admitted.
You think? Still, I didn’t have the energy to be grouchy at him. “Well, thank you.”
He glanced at me, surprise in the roundness of his green eyes. “You’re welcome. Now, why are you going up against a breeder blight on your own?”
“I didn’t know it was here.” I cast around for a weapon, but we were surrounded by bedding and towels. I didn’t think a blight would hold still while I smothered it with a pillow. “This is Daniel’s dream. He’s a nurse at Wattle Tree Park.”
Leander’s eyes narrowed and his wings twitched with irritation. “Not the nurse who was working with Ikelos?”
“No, that was Ewan. Daniel’s another one. He’s one of the good guys.” I studied Leander, looking for signs of exhaustion in the set of his shoulders. There were none. “Are you good to take this thing on or do we need help?”
“On my own?”
My pride smarted to admit it, but what choice did I have? “I’m tapped out. You said you’d bring other Oneiroi back with you.” I looked around, half expecting Oneiroi to appear like a flight of avenging angels who’d traded their feathers for chitin.
“That’s … complicated.” His gaze slid away from mine, and I narrowed my eyes. “But the upshot is that they aren’t here.”
“You promised!”
“Is now really the time to fight about it?” Leander shot another silver bolt at the ceiling. I turned in time to see it vaporise a newly hatched blight tumbling from a bursting pustule. “To answer your question, no, I don’t have enough raw power to take this thing out.”
My heart sunk to my boots, and I absently rubbed the healed skin of my arm with my other hand. Daniel was relying on me … and the breeder was too dangerous to leave wandering around in his skin. What would I do with him? Keep him unconscious in his apartment until I could get the other Oneiroi to show up? Someone would come looking for him eventually, and then what? I imagined what the suspicious-eyed Constable Nelson would say if I told him I’d abducted Daniel for the public good.
“So,” Leander continued, drawing my attention back to him, “any bright ideas?” I frowned at him and he shrugged. “Last time I saw you, you gave me a lecture about trying to brute force my way through problems. Aren’t you the one who is good at using a small amount of power to get a big result in a dream, while I’m the wasteful Oneiroi?”
A blush warmed my throat at his words as I remembered my tirade. I’d called both him and my father lazy. But he was right. “Accept the dreamer’s paradigm, then work with it,” I said, recalling my advice to them.
“Right.” He looked around. “What is there in a … whatever this place is that we can use?”
“It’s a department store.” I looked at the shelves around me. Pillows, towels and bathmats weren’t going to be of any use. Neither would clothes, no matter how garish, and the only weapons would be in the toy section—but I didn’t think foam bullets were going to cut it. “Let’s head to the sports department. They sell camping accessories. Maybe we can find some gas tanks or something.”
“Great.” The leather of Leander’s armour squeaked softly as he rolled his shoulders. “Where’s that?”
“I … don’t know.”
He stepped behind me. “May I?” Before I realised what he was doing, he’d hooked his arms around me, under my arms and up to grip my shoulders firmly. I squeaked as the aisle lurched and began to recede; air rushed across my face.
Leander flew. Not in a sedate Supergirl-style way, hand out and body steady, but in a stomach-churning lift and drop as his wings pumped, carrying us up over the aisles. My feet dangled close to the dusty tops of the shelves as I swallowed a rush of adrenalin and looked around, squinting through the gloom. A crooked sign, smeared with goo from the falling ceiling tiles, gave me the clue I needed. “Over there … oh god, Leander.” This last was a gasp as he dove in the direction my finger pointed. For a heart-stopping moment I was sure we were going to collide head-first with a stack of camping chairs. Gritty air full of tile shards and who knew what else whipped around my face, and I scrunched my eyes shut and tensed all over, anticipating the snap of bone against aluminium and canvas.
Leander’s steadying hold kept my knees from buckling when we touched down delicately in the middle of the aisle. I opened my eyes and he nodded, stepping away. The light was so dim in this corner of the store that his face was little more than a pale oval. Still, I caught the hint of a smile.
When he created a tiny ball of light so we could see properly, he’d managed to straighten his features. I pretended I hadn’t noticed.
It wasn’t much of a camping department. Maybe this store had been in an inner city somewhere, or maybe this section hadn’t featured prominently in Daniel’s past. I studied the shelves; the labels on the various cans and boxes shifted like oil on water, refusing to stay still. “Dammit!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t read the labels to see which of these are flammable.”
Wings held aloft so they wouldn’t drag in the muck, Leander squatted. He placed a hand palm-down on the floor, closing his eyes. I stared as he shimmered with the same silver glow that infused his attacks. The light shivered over his skin like an aura, flaring in time with his heartbeat. Finally it faded, and he looked up at me, satisfaction quirking one corner of his lips. “How about now?”
I stared at the shelves. They seemed realer, somehow. More solid, less capricious. The sense that something was staring out from between the merchandise, waiting to attack, had faded, and the writing had stabilised, the packaging growing familiar. I expected if I compared it to a real-world sample of the same product the details would be wrong, but it was close enough for our purposes. “Wow.”
“Thank you,” Leander said, standing slowly.
“What did you do?”
“I strengthened the effect of the dreamer’s memory on the dream.”
“You can do that?” I tried to keep the stunned awe out of my voice, but—if his cocky grin was anything to go by—wasn’t successful.
A pair of gas stoves were on display partway along the aisle. Nearby were a half dozen boxes of butane gas cans, but no bigger gas cylinders of the sort I’d hoped for. Leander followed my disappointed gaze.
“The contents of those cans are flammable. But they won’t go very far.”
He strode over to the cylinders, collecting them in his arms and turning back to me. But I’d already caught sight of another promising find: a display of firelighters, paraffin cubes that the packaging claimed burned odourless and smokeless. A grim smile tugged at my lips as I scooped up the boxes, looking around for something to hold them. A trolley abandoned at the end of the opposite aisle caught my eye and I strode over, dumping the boxes with a clatter. “Put them in here.”
Soon we’d almost filled the trolley with every highly flammable object we could find: several one litre bottles of methylated spirits from the cleaning aisle, an entire pallet of bug bombs, even a shelf of hairspray. The breeder blight released several more offspring, which Leander destroyed with an almost offhanded air, leaving the huge, blubbering creature to screech its protests as we gathered the means to destroy it. I would’ve felt sorry for it, trapped upside down in the ceiling like the parasite it was, if I hadn’t known it was gradually spreading its corruption throughout the store, conquering Daniel’s subconscious mind.
Leander studied me from the other side of the trolley. I could see the shadows of fatigue under his eyes, which shocked me. Leander never looked tired. Cocky and self-assured? Yes. But tired? No. Not even when Ikelos had bound him with barbed wire. Despite his relaxed manner, increasing the hold of Daniel’s memory over the dream and destroying so many blights was draining him. And he was too proud to admit it.
I clenched my jaw and took a breath. I’d wanted to look for matches and maybe some reams of paper, but we didn’t have time. Another blight was about to hatch. “Alright.” I pulled several packets of nails down and tossed them onto the top of the trolley with a sick feeling. I’d seen enough news stories to know real-world lunatics packed their bombs with shards, to cause additional damage. “Can you get this up there, and then explode it?” I glanced at the nails. “From a d—”
The floor erupted beneath us.
Tentacles, each as thick as one of Leander’s well-muscled thighs, smashed through the floor. The blight hadn’t been as helpless as I’d assumed … and corruption hadn’t been the only thing it had been spreading. My cheek burned as a shard of floor tile sliced it, blood welling. The trolley tipped and I ignored the pain, lunging forward to steady it before its contents spilled into the sticky darkness below. Leander leaned over and gripped the frame, placing one hand on either side, his fingers brushing against mine as I let go. His grim gaze held mine for a moment, and then his wings pumped. Air washed over me as he lifted the overstuffed trolley into the air, towards the central body mass of the blight.
For a second I felt relief as he carried the improvised bomb above the thrashing tentacles. Then one of those tentacles slid around my waist, barbs as long as my palm tearing through the scorched armour of my motorcycle leathers. I gasped and prised at them with bare hands, trying to wiggle free but succeeding only in cutting my palms. Above me, the muscles in Leander’s back worked as he strained to haul the trolley upwards, ignoring the now-free baby blight buzzing around him like an oversized mosquito. He was dragging the bomb up there with brute force. Pain caused my vision to blur, but not before I realised he was going to ignite the trolley’s contents while he was holding it. The damned fool Oneiroi had no idea what would happen.
The tentacle dragged me towards the jagged hole in the floor. I didn’t look down, not wanting to see what awaited me. The wet smacking sound and the putrid smell were bad enough. Sweat beaded on my brow and I set my jaw against the pain, blinking to clear my vision, staring up at Leander.
He drove the end of the trolley into the breeder blight’s wet mass, leaning against the handle to brace it there as he conjured a spark in one hand.
The spark descended towards the makeshift bomb.
I cried out, using the last of my energy to fling a shield, a wall of force, between Leander and the trolley.
Fire and exploding chunks of meat raining down around me. My vision blackened, and I tumbled out of the dream.