WE TUMBLE OUT onto hard-packed earth like coins turned out of pockets.
I lie on my back and suck in oxygen, fighting away white and red spots that swarm from the corners of my closed eyes. There is no air in wish travel and that was a long trip. The longest I’ve ever jumped. Full of fearsome colours and malignant planets who tracked us as we passed. I don’t know if wish travel is through another dimension or through outer space or something else altogether but it’s so coldly alien that every moment in it causes you to feel as if you are folding in on yourself, that you are so insignificant you should cease to exist, not a suggestion of such but the truth of it irrefutable and absolute, and it makes your humanity feel as if it is a candle flame that has been snuffed by the finger of God.
Something cold and wet licks the side of my face.
I open my eyes to find the skinhound standing over me with his head cocked sideways, looking down at me with his one egg yolk of an eye.
It takes me a few seconds’ concentration to push out, “Hey, Winnie.”
His teeth part and that overlong, blister pink tongue flops from his jaws, lying over the jagged line of teeth embedded in bone. I push his head away before he can lick me again.
A rustling sound to my left makes me look over. Ashtoreth is rising to her feet. She’s changed. Somewhere in the trip she has shifted forms, slipped from the body she was in to a new one. Her hair is still dark as crow feathers, but now it twists and twirls around her face, gorgonesque, a nest of snakes. She’s taller and definitively more … mature, the swells and curves of her body exaggerated against the loose silver shift her clothes have become. She is everything woman: earth mother, seductress, queen, nymph, and sorceress all at once, bathed in three miles of feminine mystique.
Her skin has become a dark lavender that gleams against the simple clothing she wears.
She is barefoot.
She is afraid.
I can see it in the tension of her supple jaw and the tightness of her eyes and in every line of her new form and it makes me pull it together.
We are not safe.
Javier.
I roll to sitting and gather my legs under me and find him curled into a fetal position in a pile of dead leaves.
He’s crying, softly, to himself.
I move toward him, taking in our surroundings as I do.
We are in a clearing in a forest. Gnarled, twisted trees stretch over us, branches interlocked against the sun. The light that manages to leak through them is dim, watery, and gray like water polluted with ink. Dead leaves that rustle and move and swirl even though the air is still against my face litter the ground at my feet.
I kneel. “Javi, you okay?”
He doesn’t respond, just continues weeping bitterly.
I touch him and his skin jumps under my fingers, the nerves underneath it twitching and jerking.
“Javi? What happened?”
It takes a long moment, but finally his voice comes. It’s cracked and raspy, and strained. “I’ve never seen things so terrible.”
“What did you—” Before I can finish the question the coat nudges my mind and I have—not a memory, more an impression, of Javier pulling on me frantically, tugging down the part of me that covers his face. The part of me that covers his eyes as we teleport here.
Not me. The coat. He pulled down the coat when his lungs ran short of air.
The things I spoke of that you pass through while wishing … if you aren’t prepared …
“The worst part of it is that I couldn’t scream, Charlie.” He rolls over and looks up at me with red-rimmed rabbit eyes. “I couldn’t scream at all.”
I want to gather him into my arms and hold him.
Instead I say, “Good thing, Javi. You wouldn’t want to draw their attention.”
The skinhound growls.
Ashtoreth is there beside me.
She speaks from the corner of her mouth. “You must get up.”
“Give me a second.”
“They are almost here and they cannot find you on your knees.”
“Javi needs—”
Her face whips down, inches from mine. Black tresses of hair spill against my cheeks, she gets so close. The fear jolts hop in her eyes and this near I can see that what looks like black is actually the darkest tone of yellow, the same colour as a solar eclipse. Her teeth are sharp and white as she bares them, hissing, “I helped you as you asked. You owe me safety. Stand and protect us as is your duty.”
Flinging my arm up, I shoo her off and stand.
On my feet I can feel what she meant. Something moves toward us down the dark trail across the clearing. Something powerful.
My hand reaches into the coat.
“Do not draw your weapon. Here that is an act of war.”
“I’m fine with that,” I snap.
“You brought us here, Charlie. For the sake of all of us, eat your stubbornness.”
I want to pull the sword. Whatever comes is moving like a high-pressure front across the ocean. Its steps vibrate my shinbones through the soles of my boots and its breath makes the leaves on the trees above shake free and fall like rain around us.
“You sure about this?” I ask her.
It is a long second before she says, “Yes.”
I don’t believe her.
But I stand here, unarmed, and wait.
I can draw my sword quick enough.
I can.
The air grows thick, coldly humid, and clammy. It’s hard to breathe, like a wet cloth is pressed over my mouth. Despite the weak sunlight still pouring down, the shadows thicken, slithering through the woods around us until all I can see of the forest floor is the nearest trunks of the trees that soar above.
My stomach tightens, a knot inside my body, and I can’t remember when the last time I ate was.
Oh yeah. At the rest stop.
Even as my breath curls into a wisp of fog in front of my face I’m sweating under my clothes and it makes me feel tacky all over like I’ve been painted in honey and then got dressed. The urge to shake out of the coat so I can cool off hits me strongly and I shrug my shoulders without thinking about it.
The coat screams at me.
The wail of it slices across the backs of my eyes, an ice pick through my temples, so shocking it makes me seize on the inside.
What the…?
Realization drops on me like a sack of cement. I was about to take off the coat. I would have put aside its help and the items it holds inside itself. Oathbreaker. The Aqedah. Any other things I haven’t discovered yet.
I’d have been not just unarmed but disarmed.
Now that I know it I can feel, under the cold and the dark, the softly subtle spell, like perfume on a spring day, that has been working on me. It creeps along the ground and gently laps against me. Insidious.
Sneaky, sneaky.
Reaching inside, I spark my own magick to life, pushing it through my blood, letting it course through me and burn away the influence.
My right hand glows from the inside as the Mark on my palm lights up with spellwork. Glancing down, I can see the tracery of my veins and the phalanges like shadows under the skin.
The oncoming presence stills, pausing just outside of the clearing. It stands there, in the shadows, where it cannot be seen.
The skinhound growls so low I feel it more than hear it.
“Shush, Winnie,” I say. “Javi, get up.”
The skinhound goes silent, standing by my hip. Javier climbs to his feet with a groan and sways over them. His arms are crossed over his stomach and his head is low, but he’s standing.
I speak out the side of my mouth to Ashtoreth, watching the trail. “I thought you were taking us to the Man in Black.”
“He is near.”
“Where?”
“Near,” she snaps. “What more do you want from me?”
I want you to put me in front of the red-handed bastard.
But I bite my tongue. She did the best she could.
Time stretches around us as we wait for the thing in the shadows to come forward. I want to glance at Ashtoreth, to get some clue as to how we should proceed, but I don’t. This is my hunt. My mission.
Like she said: I brought them here.
Fuck it.
I take three steps forward, nudging the coat as I do. It flares out around me like batwings, sweeping a swirl of leaves behind me as I stride. Each step I drive my magick down my arm and into my Mark until it crackles and pops, dripping etheric energy in fat crimson gobbets. They fall and sizzle as they strike the dead leaves, bursting them into tiny bonfires that are snuffed out by the coat as I walk, creating a trail of smoke behind me.
Raising my hand, I shove more magick into it, making my Mark flare in the darkness and the words from my mouth roll like thunder.
“I am Charlotte Tristan Moore and I am here to claim my vengeance on the one called Nyarlathotep.”
It takes a long moment for the echo of my words to fade. When it does there is a quiver in the shadows and the thing that has approached steps into the fading light where I can see it.
Oh.