Into Dreams: A Gina Harwood Novel (Gina Harwood Series Book 3) Page 40

  The man sighed and threw a tight-lipped smile at the woman leaning over Chris. “I’m Yori Hanagawa. I believe I’ve been mentioned.” He thrust the disk out at her. “It’s a talisman, a powerful one, aligned against the thing that’s getting ready to slither into our world through that rip in space up there. And we could really use it in the upcoming battle, so once you’re done dealing with him,” he nodded curtly at Nathan, “then kindly have one of them run it out to me. Now, if you’ll kindly excuse me, I have to save my partner before she hemorrhages to death.” He set the disk on the floor of the van and closed the door. Chris watched his silhouette walk calmly away, shouting something he couldn’t make out at the makeshift soldiers beside the van.

  “Something ain’t right about that man,” complained Mama, reaching over to pick up the talisman.

  “He said once we’re done dealing with Nate,” repeated Chris slowly, blinking at the door. “What are we supposed to do? Exorcise him?”

  Mama LaVey held her breath and reached out with the disk, touching it gently to Nate’s skin. There was no reaction and she shrugged, blowing out a relieved puff of air. “Maybe it’s broke. But,” she brought the disk close to her face, and Chris thought she might be sniffing at it. “I can feel somethin’ in it. It’s strong, honey. Strong.”

  Several more gunshots fired, much closer now, and Chris saw the muzzle flash of one of the guns outside the vehicle. “Well, we better do something, fast,” he whispered hoarsely, struggling to keep the whimper out of his voice. He heard something scratch at the door and a bizarrely-shaped shadow passed beyond the window.

  “I’m feelin’ a lot of bad shit,” groaned LaVey, her eyes wide as she stared past him, and he was certain she’d seen it too. Another muzzle flash and crack, and something heavy thumped against the outer panel. “A lot of dark, dark wrong here.”

  “We’re here to fix Nate,” reminded Chris in a whisper, leaning close to make sure his friend was still breathing. He was, but they seemed shallow and awfully far apart.

  “You’re here to fix Nate,” grumbled LaVey. “I’m here ‘cause I got the worst luck. Lord, whatever I did in my past life, I am sorry. Truly.” She snorted, but it was a nervous, high-pitched snicker that escaped her lips. “Sorry.”

  “You said you didn’t believe in any of that,” replied Chris.

  “I’ll believe in whatever I got to ta’ get out of this alive, child,” she snapped back, bobbing her head. “Cause I ain’t looking to go back to that blackness today.” She laid the disk against Nate’s chest, but again, it seemed to have no effect. “Guess maybe we wait,” she shrugged.

  Two more shots fired outside, and something let out a strangled cry. “I don’t think we have that kind of time,” fretted Chris, worrying at the edge of his jacket.

  “My girl’s in there, and she’s a fighter,” said LaVey, and her voice was soft and serious. Chris turned to look at her, but she was staring into Nate’s sleeping face. “You get ‘em, girl. You fight. You fight til you got no fight left, then you come back and tell me what to do, and I swear I’ll do it. No backtalk. I’ll do it.”

  Chris bit his lip and returned his attention to the window, through which he could now see almost nothing at all.

  79

  Nathan Jones stumbled, but was happy to land on his feet, and even happier to be out of that awful portal. He felt Melissa’s hand clenched around his own and squeezed it before dropping it, looking around at his new surroundings. Esther Locke was gone, but there were plenty of other people here, and Nate froze for a moment, fear shooting down his spine.

  “They can’t see you,” reminded Melissa, but her reply was a whisper nonetheless.

  Nate nodded and stepped forward tentatively, his eyes tracking a path throughout the small, dimly lit clearing. It was deep evening, he could still see the barest trace of the lighter blue sky before it graduated into the black night sky. A thick pine forest surrounded them, and dry needles crunched beneath his feet as he crept forward to better inspect the gathered people. He peered under their heavy, wool cloaks, and saw only men chanting something unintelligible to him, arranged in an uneven circle. “Are all of these people connected to that thing like Locke is?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “So there’s more.”

  “There,” she whispered, pointing at an ornately carved altar underneath a massive, twisting black tree that stood out bizarrely among the uniform pines. Two small flames lit the area, dancing in their black candles in an unfelt breeze, and Nate noticed complex and artistic seals painted on both the tree and the chantry in a liquid that shone sickeningly in the dim yellow light.

  “Is that…?”

  “Yeah,” she answered, not needing to hear the rest of the question. “I’ve sat through this entire ritual a few times now. It was nice of Esther to skip us ahead a bit.” She shivered. “If you really want to know where it came from, go look in there.” Melissa pointed to a small lean-to shack at the edge of the forest, which had previously been obscured from Nate’s view by the shrouded congregation.

  Nate decided he didn’t really care to know and knelt in front of the shrine, looking up at her and breathing hard. “Does it matter which one?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, glancing behind him nervously. “Hurry.”

  Nathan followed her gaze to see a severe looking younger man, not too much older than himself and with an unpleasantly sharp face and unsettling black eyes, step forward from the congregation and shake off his cloak. His breath fogged in the cold night, but he was clothed only in thin white boxers underneath, with another sigil painted in blood across his chest. Nate felt his mouth stretch into a smile as he felt an absolute certainty come over him. “Got it,” he said, turning his attention back to the sigil in front of him. Not the altar, he thought. The tree. And his chest. He didn’t understand why he knew, but he didn’t question the knowledge. It was the same certainty he’d felt the moment his mother passed, an inerrant sense of reality. The tree and his chest.

  His hand hovered above the altar, but he thought better of it. If he was going to be noticed as soon as he acted, he wanted to get the dangerous part out of the way first. “I hope this works,” he said, glancing sidelong at Melissa.

  “Me too,” she breathed, wide-eyed as he reached his fingers toward Locke’s body.

  Nate took a deep breath and connected, the touch sending a wave of confusion through everyone assembled. He quickly drew his hand through the blood on the man’s chest before he could step away and whirled, leaping at the tree. There were shouts of anger and confusion behind him, and he felt something grab at his legs, but he was singlemindedly focused on the sigil in front of him, and he smudged it with both hands before digging his fingernails into the wood and dragging them through the bark. Locke dragged him away, hovering over him like a great dark shadow.

  “This is not how it went,” he snarled, and red pinpricks of light jumped to life within his unusual dark eyes. A line of static appeared, and fritzed through his image.

  “It is now,” grunted Nate, kicking up at the man’s face as hard as he could with his heel, pushing his whole body off of the ground as he did so. It connected with a crack, and the man’s head snapped back, his body following it to the ground. One by one, the assembled man flickered out like a light, leaving only the pine trees, which blurred until they were just blobs of dim color. He felt a hand under his shoulder and stood with Melissa’s help, panting as the adrenaline leeched out of him. “Did it work?” he asked.

  Melissa opened her mouth to speak, and she was smiling, but distant, so distant that when her lips moved, he could only hear the faintest echo of her voice. He struggled to hang on to her presence, but she was very far away. Nate felt himself being pulled upward, outward, and flinched from the momentary unpleasantness of the black ooze before falling into a darkness that didn’t hurt, didn’t prick. In fact, it did nothing at all.

  80


  Victor felt them before he saw them, the delicate hairs on the back of his neck prickling as they stood upright. He narrowed his eyes, listening, and heard nothing but the hum of his computer and the rhythmic beeps of Gina’s monitors, but a shadow passed beyond the frosted glass of his office windows. Only after seeing it did he hear the faint skitter it made, almost beyond even his hearing. Sliding silently out of his chair, he reached out tentatively to the hallway, feeling for consciousness and finding only fleeting shadows of thought, not the organized mental narrative of a human.

  Not good, he thought to himself, scanning the comatose woman’s vitals before rounding his desk and gliding to the office door to ensure that it was locked. It was. But the entire unit was locked down, and no one, nothing, should have been able to enter the hallway. He moved back to his desk and perched on the edge of it, focused on the door. In any other circumstance, Victor would have investigated, but Yori’s picture and subsequent phone call had introduced a level of fear he wasn’t accustomed to feeling anymore. His job was to protect Gina, and stay alive. Not find out what was scuttling down the hallway, breathing irregularly, whose thoughts were as foreign and inhuman as any he’d felt in his long years.

  Rattling slightly, the door handle moved just an inch before flicking back up into its normal position. Victor felt his fangs creep out of their sockets as his shoulders tensed, knuckles white against the edge of the desk. He briefly considered his unit-assigned handgun, which remained locked in the top drawer, but a sardonic smile tugged at one side of his mouth at the thought. I am not human. I need no gun. The thoughts were full of bravado, but he felt no such rush of courage; he was, however, certain that whatever was scratching at the glass was neither friendly, nor likely to be harmed by bullets. Perhaps silver ones. He reprimanded himself for not running to the unit armory immediately upon receiving the message, but there was not enough time for much self-flagellation, as a thin blue mist began seeping through the cracks.

  Not good at all. Victor slid off of the desk and into a crouch, his nails extending into pointed claws, tense and uncertain. The mist reformed into a sort of catlike shape, a large cat, or a wolf, a bear, he couldn’t be sure; it moved like a panther but its size and proportions were constantly shifting, and it blinked back and forth across its path as it slinked towards him. A long, blue tongue lolled from its fanged mouth and writhed as though it had a life of its own, darting this way and that as the smoke creature that carried it drew closer.

  A shrill alarm sounded behind him, followed by another, and Victor whirled to see the lines on Gina’s monitor spiking and dipping spastically, as her body seized on the table. “Not good!” hissed Victor as the creature leapt towards her.

  He jumped with inhuman speed, colliding with it in midair, and for having dissipated through the door, it was surprisingly solid when he hit. He clawed at the creature, and electric blue streaks appeared as his nails tore through the thing’s skin, or fur, or spines, he couldn’t be sure. But I did hurt it, he observed, baring his fangs in a snarl. The creature evaporated from his arms, appearing a few feet away and instantly leaping at his face.

  You need to attend to Ms. Gina, he reminded himself. The hound-cat shot its prehensile tongue towards his head lightning-quick, and even with his preternatural reflexes, he felt the air of it as it passed by his skull. No, he corrected. I need to kill this thing fast, before she dies on the table. He flinched as he heard the alarms fall into their singular discordant harmony, and glanced over to see the flat lines crossing the monitor. Her heartbeat, a constant rhythmic thrum in his ears over the last few days, was silent. Victor circled back around, drawing the thing away from Gina and growled low, his face contorted with rage as he fumbled behind his back for a shot of adrenaline.

  Motion caught his eye and he noticed a second and third cloud of blue steam pouring into the room, one from the door and one from behind his kitchen curtain. You have got to be kidding me, he thought, sagging slightly before launching himself into a sprint towards Gina’s bedside. Why bother? he felt himself think, and was unable to stop the rest of it from seeping to the front of his mind. We will both be dead shortly anyhow.

  “Not today,” snarled Victor, reaching her bedside and stabbing the needle into her chest, plunging its contents into her heart.

  81

  Things had unfolded quickly, so quickly that Morgan hadn’t had a chance to mentally process any of it. He supposed this was a good thing, this bizarrely dissociative experience of being aware of looking through his own eyes, as the scene beyond where he moved instinctively through a bloody battleground looked to be too chaotic and surreal to try and think through. One moment he was fighting off a dozen cloaked Brotherhood, feeling a dagger bury itself in his shoulder and screaming in pain at the white-hot vibration of the blade scraping bone. The next moment, the entire army fell backwards dead from a great sweeping wind he didn’t feel, but that tore at the sand on the rocks and flung dustdevils across the foothills. Pan danced happily in front of Gina, clothed in the skin of an aristocrat instead of his fur and hooves, seeming to appear from nowhere, blinking suddenly into existence. Morgan had been relieved when he heard the Cat exclaim his surprise, having honestly wondered if he’d blacked out during the battle.

  His relief had instantly morphed into rage as Gina explained why the army had died, and though he doubted the explanation made a lot of sense to any of the others in the group, they all circled in to protect her, sensing - as he did - the change in the air. He slashed out at Pan as he transformed into the faun form he recognized, but the hateful creature danced out of his reach, and he was loathe to break the circle around his partner. Gina was straining with all her might against something, looking for all the world like an accomplished mime pushing against an imaginary wall, and her face was contorted with the effort. The air grew heavier still, and there was an inhuman howling that split through the low hum Morgan hadn’t noticed until now. Some sort of ooze was dripping from the seam, freely, and creatures began to drop from it as it widened. Horrible things. This was about the time Morgan took a mental back seat and let his body take over.

  Morgan Snyder had never considered himself a particularly violent person. Sure, he’d got in his share of brawls through school and even one or two as an adult, but he had never seriously hurt any of his opponents, that he knew. He had never shot anyone before this place. He had certainly never stabbed anyone, or sliced through them, or any of the other things that he’d done in just the last few minutes, cutting a swath through the flesh, and fur, and slime that ran their way. He glanced down at himself, covered head-to-toe in blood spatters, breathing heavily in a tense half-crouch, and wondered who he was right now. He certainly didn’t much feel like himself.

  There was a momentary break between waves of creatures, and he glanced at his fellow soldiers. Agni’s eyes were wild, but the rest of him was composed, prepared, ready. He twirled the daggers lightly in his hands, and his arms didn’t shake. Toma was another story; the giant had fought valiantly, but was gasping heavy draws of air and looked unsteady on his feet. “Take a second,” Morgan heard his own voice say, as his hand reached out to touch the man’s arm. “More are coming.” Toma nodded and his breathing slowed and deepened.

  Kyrri mewed pitifully up at Gina, who was paying absolutely no attention to the war being waged around her. It was painfully clear that she was completely absorbed in a battle of her own, and blood dripped from her nose, painting a wide swath of crimson down her chin and chest like war paint. There was a faint golden aura around her, a translucent light that outlined her body and pulsed around her fingertips, but she was clearly in a great deal of pain. As he watched, a single blood-red tear fell down her cheek and he heard himself utter a guttural snarl at his own inability to help her.

  “Morgan!” cried Toma, calling his attention back just as a pair of skeletal-thin fleshy spider creatures descended on them, and he jumped back into the fray. This wave wasn’t small, and the pile of dead thin
gs continued to grow. He saw a flash of fur as Kyrri leapt over them into the crowd of creatures jostling around and past them, just as he buried his dagger into the eye of the second spider, and watched as the Cat shredded the distorted face of something that almost looked human. Another came from behind, and Morgan sprinted forward, knowing that he wouldn’t reach Kyrri before the comically large claws on the creature sliced the cat in two, but he skidded to a halt as one of Agni’s daggers embedded itself in the creature’s skull.

  Searing pain shot through Morgan’s mind, lancing through each of them as they fell to the ground. He cracked his eyes open through the ache and glanced up at Gina - and up, and up. She was in the air, directly in front of the shadow, almost fully eclipsed by the golden light that etched itself into his retinas. “GINA!” he heard himself shout, but he could hear nothing over the ringing in his ears. He looked up, fearful that the creatures would overrun them as they writhed on the ground, but they too seemed affected, howling and screaming in a bizarrely silent mime. Some fell over, unconscious or dead, and the liquid smoke veil pulsed like an exposed heart in the desert sky. Morgan felt his hands fall from his ears, not because the pain was any less, but simply in awe as he watched the interplay between light and shadow before him.

  A shock wave hit the desert, and Morgan had just enough time to register the strange pattern in the sand rushing toward them before it hit the platform and sent them all flying backwards, toppling over dead Brothers as they tumbled, end over end. The agony in his skull ceased, the light switch of pain flicked suddenly to off.

  Morgan scrambled to correct his position and searched the sky for the glowing woman. He found the spot just as the tear popped close, imploding upon itself in waves until it disappeared entirely from view. Motion caught his eye and he followed Gina Harwood’s descent as her glow extinguished itself in a flash and she fell limply through the air until landing hard and awkwardly on the wood, his legs propelling forward in seeming slow-motion, jumping for the platform just as she blasted into the beams with a sickening crunch.