S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 10
September 22, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Two, Pt. 2
Zoe sat in the parking lot in a rental sedan, watching the sun stew closer and closer to the western horizon. Omar and Shoshanna were twenty-two minutes late and neither of them had picked up her phone calls or radio transmissions. While low-volume music played through the speakers, she scribbled symbols against a handheld chalkboard, focusing on a psychic ritual spell that might let her reach out for a couple seconds of contact. Enough time to confirm what, if anything, had gone wrong.
It took a well-trained witch like herself twenty-five seconds of labor to create a psychic communications link one second long. Having had little to eat considering the day’s labors, and wanting some physical resources on reserve in case things had gone wrong in a dangerous way, Zoe hoped that five seconds would give her enough time for an update.
Assuming Omar decided to respond.
On her fourth repetition of the brief ritual, the song changed.
She noticed because it had changed in the middle of another song.
Once Upon a Time There Was a World. Piano music opened it up. Outside, thin strata clouds knifed across the bleeding sunset. Zoe dropped the chalk, tears welling up immediately. As Orlando Vasquez set his guitar to wail apocalyptic, Zoe wiped at her eyes and peered at the rearview. A limo pulled into the lot, the only other vehicle present. Throwing the chalk board on the passenger seat, Zoe brought her hand to rest on the grip of her sidearm.
The limo stopped twenty feet away.
Leonid Singh climbed out of the passenger seat. He carried a manila folder in his hands.
“Fuck you!” Zoe shouted, spilling out of her car. “Fuck you!”
Leo held his hands up, surrendering in gesture only. “Zoe, please—”
She jerked her pistol out of its holster. Held it next to her leg, shaking. “Fuck you.”
“I’m so sorry.” He stepped back, hands up. “Please.”
She dropped her gun. She didn’t want to shoot Leo. She wanted to hurt a lot of people, in that moment, but Leo wasn’t one of them. When she spoke, again, all the volume had gone out of her voice. “What…happened?”
“Ten years ago, you saved a young man’s life. Today, he returned the favor.”
“What?”
“Omar dropped the students off somewhere. A bus station, a train station…nobody knows. They’re ‘in the wind,’ as the saying goes.” Leo slowly lowered his hands until both of them held the folder. “He reappeared not long after with an offer for the Board. He had Gillian Briar and Karen Woeser with him.”
“He turned them over?”
“Jill came voluntarily. And he had terms. Most were easy to meet. Some were harder. He wanted you to go formally un-accused and unpunished for any doings—that was the hardest. Especially after this morning. But as far as the Board or the Belgian are concerned, you were never even here.”
“What happened to Jill?”
Leo gestured with the manila folder. “We’re getting to that.”
“Karen?”
“She’s in the Belgian’s custody, or will be soon. We’ve alerted the Ravens and they’ve sworn to send someone to watch over her and ensure against any kind of physical or psychological torture, any violence or duress of any kind.”
“But they’ll keep her imprisoned? Interrogated?”
“Until the day she dies, yes.”
Zoe stumbled backward until her spine met the side of her car. “Leo, how could you?”
“Because I had to make a choice.”
“What’s in that folder?”
“Someone had to take a fall for everything that happened in Salem.”
“No. No, no, no, Leo, no…”
He opened the folder and turned over the first page inside. “The story the police are putting together reads like this: Gillian Briar, after a lifelong struggle with addiction and mental illness, started a cult. She sought out troubled people, children especially, and promised to teach them magic. Unfortunately, the cost of running her fraudulent school, as well as the general cost of everyone living in the house, became overwhelming. Jill became paranoid and started talking about secret societies and covert conspiracies, using these scapegoats to cover for her own mistakes. She told the people who trusted her that they were being targeted by spells and hexes, that she could only protect them inside the house. Eventually, the isolation and abuse led to a young boy’s suicide. Later, it led to murder.”
Zoe sucked air through a half-closed throat, trying not to let her ragged breaths turn into sobs. “You can’t. You can’t.”
He turned over the next page. “She’ll be found mentally incompetent to stand trial. Her break from reality, the delusions she’s suffered for her whole life…the legitimate belief she seems to have in literal magic and extant secret societies…she’ll never see prison.”
Zoe sank to the asphalt, shaking her head. “You killed her. You son of a bitch, you killed her.”
Leo blinked, stepping back. His own gaze shone glassy in the sunset. He cleared his throat. “Due to overcrowding at state institutions, Gillian Briar will be held in a specialized Winters-Armitage facility, newly constructed.”
Zoe couldn’t stop shaking.
Leo took a quivering breath and wiped stray mourning from beneath his eyes. “She will be treated with the utmost care. Due to her current legal status, you will assume conservatorship. Naturally.”
She couldn’t stop shaking. She felt like her bones were crumbling. She felt like an apocalypse was happening inside of her.
“I need you to sign one affidavit affirming Jill’s—Gillian’s—lifelong and legitimate belief in the literal supernatural, and I need you to sign these papers to begin the process of gaining conservatorship.”
“How could you do this?” Zoe asked, unable to look at anything or even stop shaking. “How could Omar?”
“We had to.”
“He could’ve met me here. He could’ve just kept driving. He could’ve just kept…”
“For how long? How long do you think you could hide from the Board, from the Belgian and his Consortium? And is that really the life Jill and Karen wanted for those children? To live either imprisoned in some secret bunker or running eternally away from one or another active operative? Zoe, I—” his voice cracked. He swallowed. “I didn’t want this, either. Believe me. But the kids have disappeared and I believe Omar is good enough at what he does that nobody will find them any time soon. I believe he’s good enough that he can make it a waste of time and resources to try. And at least Jill and Karen are still alive.”
Zoe barked a laugh, still struggling for control over her own nervous system.
Leo angled his body away. Face drawn low, he sighed. He didn’t look back up as he continued. “It’s a far better resolution than any that looked likely before. And now it can be over.”
(every story)
Zoe pushed herself up, tendons still jumping randomly through her meat, and wiped a sheet of grief from her face. Her hands shook. “It’s not over, Leo.”
“Perhaps it never is. But if you sign this, nobody has a reason to make anything worse.”
“I’ll sign it for the kids. But this isn’t over. I’ll figure out how to get her out of there, one way or another.”
“I hope you do.” He turned the manila folder toward her and plucked a marbled pen from a jacket pocket. He hesitated before holding it out to her. He didn’t watch as she started writing.
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A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty Two, Pt. 1
The Manifestation flashed toward Zoe and Zoe’s right knee twisted and caved as she bent for her gun. The Manifestation crashed into her, a blunt force bullet, and she tumble-tumble-rib-bruising-tumbled across the floor, landing face-down and breathless. She pushed herself up to all fours, braced for the Manifestation’s next blow.
The monster stood, frozen mid-stride next to Zoe’s dropped sidearm.
“I am ninety-nine days clean.” Jill’s voice rolled in from every corner of the void. “I am not the person I was.”
“As above, so below,” Sung-ho said.
“As above, so below,” Zoe croaked, still on her elbows and knees.
“This is my domain, not yours. You’re not the god. I am.” Jill flicked her wrist and the Manifestation slammed against the optical-illusory floor hard enough to rupture its arm from its shoulder. “You are the lowest power here. You are a whisper, a rodent, a roach. You threaten my sister? Her mentor?”
Jill pointed her bloated, wrong-way-broken hand at Sung-ho and all of his bounds released at once. He fell forward, dizzy with pain and bloodloss. He clambered away from the chair, panting. Once he’d managed a dozen scrambling paces, he collapsed onto his back.
“The world will crush you like stones it will slice you up it will needle you, burn you, hang you!”
Jill limped forward and yelped. She took a breath, stabilized herself, and jerked her good hand through the air. The Manifestation followed, flying blur-fast across the room until it crashed into the empty chair and blew it to splinters with the force of the impact.
“There are people who will save me,” Jill said.
The Manifestation struggled against unseen forces, manipulated gravity, and dust. It tried to stand. “I’ll win one day, frail little witch.”
“Sometimes you will. And there are people who will save me.”
“You’ll hurt them. I’ll make you. I can make anyone run away from you.”
“If that were true, I’d be fighting you alone.” Jill took another step, groaning through the pain, and held her good hand out toward the staggering Manifestation. All the ropes, chains, twine, and leather the Manifestation had used to bind Sung-ho began to wrap around it, instead. “But it’s not, because you’re fighting us alone.”
“The world wins.”
“Yeah. And then the sun wins. And then some black hole wins. What hurt you so much that you became this thing?” Jill half-collapsed and half-knelt, peering up at the bound Manifestation. “All the pain that we’ve magnified together, all the anguish we’ve paid forward…tell me what hurts so much. Please.”
“What, are you insensate?”
“Tell me what you see.”
“The weeping indigent, the abused, the hollowed-out, the exhausted, the hanged boys and raped girls, the waste, the wasting away, the despair and the desperate, the knife in skeleton-hands, the hatred, oh the hatred, hatred written through every archive of history and on every column of culture, so much hatred you could get love-drunk on it, and so very much violence…”
Tears creased the patina of sweat and gore crusting Jill’s face. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I am. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But that’s why I have to seal you here.”
“You’ll be back.”
Jill stood again. “Probably. But even if I can’t change the world, I owe it to people to try. To help. I owe it to Jonathan. I owe it to Sung-ho and Zoe. I owe it to myself.”
The Manifestation said nothing. It just stared at her. “As above, so below,” Jill whispered.
###############They jolted awake in the ritual space, morning sun spilling down from the skylight.
Sung-ho screamed rolling onto his side. His hand wasn’t completely destroyed—not in the literal, material world—but some of the damage had transferred over. Gashes and cuts criss-crossed the back of his hand, bleeding.
Zoe tried not to mirror Sung-ho’s volume, her back wet red and burning pain, and pushed herself up onto all fours. It hurt scream-worthy but she knew that Sung-ho’s wounds required more immediate attention. She choked on her own voice, crawling across the floor.
Hobbling to her feet, her breaks becoming sprains and her sprains becoming aching inflammation, Jill went for the nearby first aid kit and the pack of esoteric salves they’d readied for the ritual. Still hobbling, she navigated the dozen or so feet over the course of seconds. She wrapped Sung-ho’s hand in bandage and began muttering a healing spell.
For natural adepts, minor or even moderate healing could take very little time to apply. For people without the natural-born talents, including everyone in the room, it took sixty seconds minimum to patch a scrape—and they had much worse than mere scrapes. Even with their injuries diminished by the transition from the mystic to the material, it took almost an hour for Jill to attend to their wounds. In the exertion, Jill threw up twice and worsened her own damages. After they’d stopped groaning and grunting and panting, Sung-ho and Zoe returned the favor as best they could.
Bandaged and healed beyond the need for medical attention, the trio sat in the ritual space for a long time afterward, not knowing what to do or say next. “Even with the salves and the spells, it might take a few days for everything to heal,” Jill said.
Zoe and Sung-ho nodded.
“I, uh…” Jill swallowed. “Thank you. I know I’ve said it, before, but just…thank you.”
“Any time,” Zoe replied.
Sung-ho flexed and clenched his hand. Flexed and clenched. “Feels tight.”
“It will for a while.”
“Huh.”
“Well.”
“Well,” Sung-ho agreed.
“What now?” Zoe asked.
“I…don’t know,” Jill admitted. “I guess…I guess I have a lot to figure out.”
Zoe nodded. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”
Sung-ho stood up, stretching. “But first, I need everyone to help me un-barricade my house.”
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September 16, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty One, Pt. 3
They turned right. They rode Summit to Crescent to Witchcraft Road. Zoe turned them onto Puritan and when the SUV approached the arc of pavement leading up to Witchcraft Heights Elementary, Zoe hit the brakes. “Go!”
Side doors slid open, the passenger door popped. Jill and Karen, Niveah and Eliot and Dimitri, they raced uphill toward Omar’s rented SUV in the school parking lot. Nobody said goodbye because nobody had the time. Zoe watched them ascend for a few seconds and allowed herself a deep, filling breath. They’d gotten through the second detour without incident. Hitting the button that automatically closed the open doors, Zoe eased the rental back into drive.
The magic she’d felt building in her sixth sense flared. The spell activated, whatever and wherever it was, and latched onto either her or her vehicle. Driving the speed limit, she left the drop-off point behind and continued northward out of town.
She had one last stop to make before switching cars again and heading out to the meet-up. Hopefully it wouldn’t take long.
Throwing off her hat and shaking her hair loose, she headed for the highway. As she approached the massive intersection of various off- and on-ramps and turn-offs, her enemies appeared in the rearview. A black sedan and a white van, both with tinted windows, accelerated toward her. The sedan hung back, keeping a car between itself and her SUV, while the van pulled up close in the lane to her left. Its front bumper hovered near-adjacent to her rear bumper. She wondered who waited behind the darkened glass.
When the light turned green, she didn’t get on the highway. She drove forward, out toward rural Massachusetts, while her tails shed all attempts at camouflage and glued themselves to her rear. She almost stomped the brakes just to spite them. Instead, she waited until the traffic died out and a suburban side-road opened up on her left. Turning into the development, she pulled over and turned on her hazard lights.
The sedan parked behind her while the van parked ahead of her and on the other side of the street.
Two men in suits climbed out of the sedan. They looked like government agents by design—while privately employed, things worked best if witnesses perceived them as having the extreme authority and unapproachability of federal agents. The two men, both white with short hair, approached Zoe’s SUV. In the sideview and rearview mirrors, she noticed holsters and mystical tac-packs barely-hidden by their jackets.
With her left hand, Zoe rolled down the window. With her right, she gripped her sidearm.
Zoe didn’t recognize the man in the suit, but he recognized her.
“She’s one of ours,” he called back to whoever else waited nearby, listening.
“Agent,” she said.
“Agent,” he replied, at her window. He angled himself to peer over her shoulder into the rest of the vehicle. “This vehicle was seen carrying subjects of a sensitive operation.”
“Am I the subject of a sensitive operation?” Zoe asked, flat-faced.
“No, no, of course not…” he trailed off, frowning at the emptiness behind Zoe.
“I’m extracting,” Zoe said. “Up to Oceanrest for an emergency de-brief and then…you know how it goes.”
“Get out of the car.”
Zoe’s eyebrows arched. “Really?”
“We have to run a check.”
Zoe sighed theatrically. Unbuckled her seatbelt. Chuckling and shaking her head, she levered off the safety on her sidearm. “Alright, if that’s how we’re doing this…” she pushed the door open and stepped out of the car.
Suit #1 gestured at Suit #2 and whoever else waited in the sedan. Suit #2 approached the SUV with his eyes closed, doing his best to focus all of his attention on the feedback provided by his sixth sense. Maybe he was searching for some kind of major invisibility ritual or a ward against notice, some kind of trick she could’ve used to hide her passengers from sight. He put his hands on the frame and whispered incantations for insight.
Suit #1 kept his hands on his waist, his right hand near his poorly-hidden holster. Zoe did the same.
“Someone wiped a whole team of the Belgian’s operatives,” Suit #1 said, watching her. “Honestly, some of us think it was pretty impressive. Assuming the woman who did it can get away with it.”
“How do they know it was a woman?”
“Some shitty CCTV footage.”
“What if it was a guy in a wig?”
“Even more impressive, then.” Suit #1 didn’t seem impressed. He didn’t seem amused, either.
“Well, she won’t get away with it, in any case.”
“You don’t think?”
“Against the Belgian’s apparatus?” She snorted faux-amusement. “Against ours?”
Suit #1 nodded.
Suit #2 stepped away from the hood and folded his legs, sitting lotus in front of the car. Eyes closed, he continued whispering incantations. Sweat glistened across his face. Focus knit his forehead. A soft, sixth-sense hum vibrated through the ground. A few minutes later, shirt soaked with sweat, Suit #2 stood and shook his head. “She’s clean.”
Suit #1 nodded, dropping his hands from his waist. “Sorry to bother you, Agent.”
“Emergency SOP is still SOP.”
She got back in the SUV and waited for both other vehicles to leave. Waiting for her heart to calm down, Zoe leaned back in her seat and lit a cigarette. Blowing smoke at the ceiling, she almost laughed.
Last stop accomplished.
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September 15, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty One, Pt. 2
Jill lurched into the vast, vertiginous dark. She limped, one ankle sprain-swollen and one wrist snap-twisted at the wrong angle. Through a veil of blood, she spat. “Get the fuck away from him,” Jill snarled.
“Stupid cumslut bitch-witch,” the Manifestation replied, voice guttural, gravelly, and phlegmatic once more. “You think you’re stronger than the crush-you-rape-you-hang-you world?”
“I’m not fighting the world,” Jill said. “I’m fighting the dumb animal that keeps telling me to sleep through it.”
The Manifestation shred through Sung-ho’s hand. Screams filled the whole void, Sung-ho thrashing wildly against his restraints as muscle and sinew and skin and ligament snapped and severed and came apart beneath the Manifestation’s blades. Deep claret poured from the unrecognizable meat, randomly firing electrical impulses twitching the flensed remains. Sung-ho howled until the howls turned to sobbing whimpers.
“You think you’re stronger than me?” the Manifestation clicked, each word pronounced by a chorus of insect mandibles. “Really?”
Jill glowered. “Where do you think you are?”
“I am a god, here.”
“You are a prisoner.” Jill swiped the shard of glass she clutched along the top of her left arm. A muscle-deep gash flooded red. The Manifestation recoiled from Sung-ho and darted for Jill. It reared up short, the bloodied edge of the broken mirror pointed at it. “See?” Jill asked. “You’re afraid of me.”
“I’ll make you watch them die.”
“You live inside my head. I’ll kill myself if you hurt them.”
“Then you’ll be dead.”
“After everything you’ve done to me, you think I’m scared of dying? Kicked out of my house, attacked in a tent, kicked and beaten, all the guilt and the shame and the people I hurt—you think I’m scared of dying? You stupid parasite.”
The Manifestation stepped back. It gestured its skeletal fingers at the air and an almost holographic image began to undulate into existence. “Winning this battle doesn’t make anything less painful, Jill. Remember the world outside this house? Remember what it’s done to you? To everyone? I can give you sanctuary from all of that.”
A hanged man. A hanged boy.
Jill panted and grimaced, limping forward on a bulbous bloat of ankle. She swiped through the hologram with her makeshift knife and glared up at the funhouse distortion of herself stretched so far over her head. “You’ve never given me anything.”
“I give you peace.”
“Oblivion.”
“Serenity.”
“The world will kill people with or without you. Everything I gave up to chase your bullshit…as if all the suffering goes away just because I’m too fucked up to feel it anymore. Everything I did for you, everyone I hurt, and it never changed anything.”
“But you didn’t have to feel it,” the Manifestation offered.
“Except I did. Every time I wasn’t getting high, I felt all of it. I traded you everything I had just to buy time.”
“So then what now? Kill yourself here, in front of all of us? Fight my bottomless hunger with your temporarily-righteous rage?”
Zoe swallowed a viscous gob of blood and mucus from the back of her throat. Blinking away some of her beaten dizziness, she noticed the pistol waiting between her feet. Pushing her tangled legs into a kneeling stance, she picked it up. Considered it.
Jill stared up at the Manifestation and it stared down in return.
“That’s what I thought,” the Manifestation hackled.
Zoe dropped the gun as she rose back to full height. “I promise you my guidance and my counsel. As above, so below.”
“As above, so below,” Sung-ho managed between anguished pants.
“You will never be free of me,” the Manifestation took two scarecrow steps toward Jill and stopped. “Never.”
“It was never about being free of you. It’s about being better than you.”
It craned its serpentine neck down so that its stretched-out, distorted visage settled its gaze on Jill’s. “You’ll feel me under everything. I’ll be with you and around you always. I’ll be waiting.”
Jill nodded. “I know.”
“I can wait for your whole life, if I have to. Sooner or later, I get to keep you.”
Jill nodded again. “Yeah. I know.”
The Manifestation’s twisted face twitched and swarmed, bubbles sizzling visibly beneath the first jaundiced layer. It blinked its translucent, greasy lids across its pinprick-iris eyes and flared its sharpened, mostly-nostril nose. “You can’t change the world. You need me to feel right about that.”
“I was stupid to imagine I could,” Jill admitted. “But if I try and I fail—”
“You’ll fail.”
“I will fail. But if I try, I’ll start helping people along the way instead of hurting them.”
The Manifestation’s posture sagged and vortexed, the fun-house Jill falling forward onto all fours, its bladed limbs twitching spider-like. “You’re too weak. You talk tough but rocks will crush you like the rest of them. I can break you whenever I want.”
“Prove it.”
It whipped lightning-fast toward Zoe.
Zoe went for her pistol, again.
Too slow.
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September 14, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty One, Pt. 1
Jill and her remaining family—Karen and Dimitri Woeser and Eliot and Niveah Tims-Briar—entered Zoe’s latest rental vehicle—an SUV—at six in the morning. They’d exited the school through the rear and had crossed three suburban lawns before reaching the rendezvous. Zoe drove a small circuit through the immediate vicinity to search for spotters. She didn’t notice any, which didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t present.
From there, they took the fastest route out of Salem and west into wilder Massachusetts, making three planned detours along the way. At the first, barely speaking, the three harrow-eyed kids, ages eight, ten, and thirteen respectively, ate a cafe breakfast while the adults loaded up on carbs and coffee. They shared the meal in intense silence, the sort of quiet that festered through any haven that a stray word might destroy.
Zoe didn’t want to hear the questions echoing around in those skulls. She didn’t have answers for them any more than Leo had had an answer for her.
(I wish I had an answer to give you)
Chewing a piece of toast, Jill glared at Zoe across the breakfast table with a heat behind her gaze that jolted Zoe. It smacked her. Why didn’t we do this sooner? Jill glanced away, saying nothing, but Zoe heard the question. Jill wasn’t psychic, not even the way Darnell had been, but Zoe heard the question anyway. Maybe she’d read it in the burst capillaries fracturing Jill’s sclera. Maybe she’d felt it somehow in her stimulant-enhanced sixth sense. Either way, it echoed around inside of her unforgettably.
Why?
Because we had to disable the tracking and scrying spells. Because we had to sabotage the covens responsible. Because they’d charged the closest thing to a Death Curse that exists, anymore, and we had to know the target. Because…
Were those reasons, or just justifications?
Because we could only extract five people and I didn’t have the courage to make the call, myself. She left a hundred bucks on the table and went outside to wait for everyone else.
She wore a baseball cap, sunglasses, her armored leather jacket too damaged to consider ‘armored,’ anymore, ditto the pants, and worker’s boots. She stood out. Smoking a clove outside of a small restaurant that early in the morning, she stood out more.
Jill emerged from the restaurant as Zoe considered a second cigarette. Without speaking, she wrapped her arms over Zoe’s shoulders, around her neck, and pulled their bodies close. “Thank you,” she whispered. Zoe embraced her sister in return, her hug clumsier for the lighter and cigarette occupying her hands. They held on tight. “I know everything’s fucked but…thank you.”
Zoe nodded, her throat closed up by something she could not name.
When Jill pulled away, she wiped at bright red, tearless eyes and sniffled. “We should’ve listened to you and just…we shouldn’t have done the funeral.”
“It’s not wrong to want to bury someone.”
“Why do they care about this?” the hug drifted apart, Jill stepping back. “Why…us?”
“I don’t know.”
“No matter what happens next, no matter what happens with you and me and…” Jill swallowed, turning away. “You’ll make sure the kids are okay, right?”
“I vow it. May the secret and sacred energies connect us always.”
Jill smiled. It was a sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. “As above, so below.”
“As above, so below.” Zoe leaned back against the facade of the cafe and lit her second cigarette.
“Make sure you put that out before the kids see you.”
“I will.”
“They’re getting the check, now. I’m going to…wait in the car, I guess.”
“See you there.”
Jill wandered over to their spot in the parking lot and climbed inside. Zoe puffed through half of the clove before dashing the cherry against the side of the building. Only afterward did she notice the ‘No Smoking’ placard and the CCTV camera next to it. Shrugging, she followed Jill into the parking lot. Karen Woeser and the children left the cafe moments later.
Pulling away from their first stop, an animal impulse rattled through Zoe’s sixth sense—a prey reflex that told her a hunter lurked nearby. She picked out their tail easily in the early morning traffic; a gray, nondescript sedan with tinted windows followed them three car lengths behind. A second sensation hummed beneath the first. In the passenger seat, Jill seemed to understand that one better—lips pursed, she glanced sideways at Zoe and dipped her chin.
A spell, then.
Zoe figured they’d use a proper tracking ritual, something that allowed a coven to follow them closely over long distances. Jill had already warded everyone from the school against such spells, so the crew casting it would have to target either Zoe or the car. Or, if that tasked proved too resource-intensive, a particularly clever or tech-savvy coven might just hack the on-board GPS unit and trace them that way. Regardless, time became a factor.
Niveah Tims-Briar either had a naturally powerful sixth sense or a surprisingly well-trained one. While the younger children watched the windows and whispered to each other, Niveah fidgeted with her hands in her lap, wary eyes flicking up to watch Zoe and Jill or to glance at the rearview before flicking away again. She plucked at her skin. Zoe hoped the younger kids wrapped themselves tightly enough in their own anxieties not to notice the more accurate disquiet of their sister. She hoped they didn’t notice for long enough, at least.
Karen reached out a saffron-hued hand and wrapped Niveah’s. She nodded to the teenager. The teenager’s jaw clenched in response.
The tail followed them all the way to their next stop, a gas station just under a mile from where Zoe had killed the Belgian’s entire on-site team. Zoe pulled up to a pump and turned off the engine. The gray sedan rolled down the street, slowing down. They stopped at a sign at the end of the block, waiting. Climbing out to pump the gas, Zoe could imagine the frantic, whispered conversation inside the vehicle. They’d know they’d been made, by now. They’d have to decide whether to engage or retreat, report to other covens for backup or just call the police. In the meantime, the tracking spell tightened around them.
Zoe refilled the tank. She swiped a dead woman’s credit card and entered a dead woman’s pin number. Climbing back inside, she watched the gray sedan. She pulled up to the gas station exit with her hood angled as if to turn right.
A gap opened up in the growing traffic and Zoe gunned it, turning left.
“Is that them!?” one of the boys yelled from the back.
“Hold on tight!” Zoe shouted back. “The next five minutes are going to get bumpy!”
She swung right, tires whimpering on asphalt, the rear of the vehicle swinging wide. They rumbled over a hill of potholes already breaking the speed limit and still accelerating. The SUV bounced and shook. People getting ready for work ignored or shouted at them. A four-way-stop intersection appeared on the hilltop and Zoe spun the wheel again. Blowing through the stop sign, they came within a foot of hitting a sedan as they curved broadly left.
Elsewhere in the tight maze of suburban sidestreets, car horns blared.
Their tail was trying to catch up to them.
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September 9, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty, Pt. 3
Zoe stumbled into a funeral home. Or the Manifestation’s interpretation of a funeral home.
She didn’t need to ask whose funeral. She didn’t stop to gawk at the mourners whose own flesh already hung in strips from their rotting bodies. (reverence the dead whose mourners too shall soon be—)(—you, too, soon—) She followed the trail of blood and heroin and tar and grease down the only hallway that mattered.
“Are you with the party for Jo—”
Zoe brushed past the thing with the suit and the half-missing face and entered—
—a vast hanging nothing. Or not nothing, but the optical illusion thereof, a combination of black paint and forced perspective that gave Zoe vertigo. She stood, not having realized she’d fallen to all fours, and spun around to search for her quarry.
Sung-ho sat tied to a chair. The Manifestation had already worked through his armor and his shirt. Sung-ho’s abdomen glistened with blood, no single wound deep enough to draw much but the dozens of barely-a-scrape scratches adding up to a lot.
“Drink?” the Manifestation asked, holding out a rocks glass of Scotch.
“No.”
The Manifestation drank the booze and threw the glass into the side of Sung-ho’s head. Zoe rushed at—
—the Manifestation hit her from the side—how?—and she rolled hard across the vertigo floor. She used the momentum to help push herself back upright and reached for her knife. She unsheathed it and spun in a single motion, striking nothing. Whirling, she searched for her target.
The Manifestation stood next to Sung-ho, a dozen paces away. It smiled shark teeth at her.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” Sung-ho wheezed between pants. “You should’ve gone for Jill.”
The Manifestation’s almost-all-white gaze boiled and simmered. Zoe went for the door—
—what door?
Where was it? Where had it been?
The room was void, hanging nowhere. No, that was an optical illusion, a trick of perspective and paint. Zoe tried to differentiate one wall from another wall. She could feel the floor under her feet but her stomach refused to believe it. She unsheathed her combat knife and turned for the one anchor that stayed stable—Sung-ho.
The Manifestation had disappeared.
She sprinted toward him. She was almost shocked to reach him. Kneeling, she took her knife and started sawing at the rope tying him down.
“You need to leave,” he said. “Get Jill. Now.”
“I need ten seconds.”
“It’s toying with you!”
She freed his right arm and before she could maneuver to work on his leg something that felt like a brick slammed into her back. She tumbled sideways and rolled away, barely avoiding the stomp of an amber-spiked heel. Standing, she swiped arcs at the air to make distance. But the Manifestation didn’t care about getting hurt. Pain fueled it. Zoe felt her blade slide through its greasy skin once, twice, and—
—and she felt it jam into the Manifestation’s neck, again. Letting go of the hilt, she stepped backwards. She hadn’t even seen the thing until she’d stabbed it. Panic reflex spun her away from the monster’s first strike, but the second sliced ribbons from her armor. She parried a third blow and reached for her holster and the creature grabbed her arm and threw her five feet through the air before she could get out her gun.
She landed with a shout, spasms and pain shooting through her muscles, bruises ripening beneath her skin. Rolling over, she managed to unholster her pistol before the Manifestation reached her again. Still kneeling, not quite ready to stand, she took a breath and fired. The Manifestation charged through the bullets uncaring, wounds oozing foam. She still hadn’t gotten her feet under her when it slammed a heel into the top of her knee and sent her down again.
“Stop!” Sung-ho shouted.
“You know how to stop it!” the walls themselves screamed back.
Zoe pointed the barrel at the monster and squeezed the trigger. She managed two bullets before it spun toward her and slapped the weapon from her hand. White froth dribbled from the holes. Zoe glanced over to where her pistol had landed—two or so feet away, precision lacking in the illusory void. She turned back toward the Manifestation in time to catch a heel with her jaw.
The mandible dislocated with a sharp, iron-hot snap. Zoe howled, the noise distorted by the warp in her lips. She twisted with the blow and tried to stand up but the ache in her battered knee slowed her down. Another blow to her back planted her on the floor again.
The Manifestation dove on top of her, raking claws through the armor protecting her back.
Protecting her spine.
It pinned her knees with its long, strong legs and craned itself down to frenzy.
“Stop!” Sung-ho shouted.
Just as the fist razorblade fingertips reached the fabric of her undershirt, the Manifestation paused. “You can make the pain stop whenever you want. Have a drink, yeobo? Smoke a cigar?—”
“Keep that word out of your mouth!”
“—Some hash, weed? Go shooting?”
Zoe clawed the ground, trying to grab something, anything, even just a thought…
“I have a fifty year Highland single malt,” the Manifestation’s gravel-growl dipped lower, somehow. “You’ll never taste anything like it again.”
“No.”
The first cuts barely parted skin. They were almost surgically precise. They flirted with bloodshed, swift and sharp and shallow as paper. Zoe tried to push herself back up and something stone-dense knocked the back of her skull. The next strikes flensed the first layer, scraping and carving the epidermis in tiny sections. Blood beaded and rolled. It slicked; it sluiced.
Zoe whimpered and groaned, cursed and grunted. She spat at darkness and tried to push herself up again. This time the Manifestation didn’t stop with a simple punch to the back of her skull. It grabbed her hair in its wet-red, tar-tangled claws and pulled her forehead off the floor and slammed it down once, twice, thrice. Zoe’s vision blurred and swam.
The Manifestation stepped away from her. “Maybe she’ll break more easily. Hey, Zo’…you probably like Sung-ho better than our dad, right?”
Was that Jill’s voice? No. It couldn’t be.
Zoe wiped at the crimson streams of her nose. She tried to push herself up but…why bother? What strength did she have left?
“The thing is: the world wins. You can’t beat it. If you try, it’ll beat you and rape you and leave you for dead in a ditch somewhere. The world is big and strong and hungry and you threatened to change it, what else was did you expect it to do? It’ll hurt less if you just close your eyes. Drift away.”
“Sung-ho,” Zoe slurred, rolling herself onto one side. “What are you doing to…?”
“I don’t have to do anything, Zoe,” it sounded less gravelly than before, less phlegmatic. “I don’t have to harm a hair on his head—”
“Zoe! Don’t!” Sung-ho shouted.
Half-kneeling, half on all fours, Zoe tried to make the floor make sense to her. She heard a sharp slapping sound, a shout of pain, and a dull thud. Sung-ho groaned and spat.
The Manifestation continued: “All you have to do is give up and I won’t have to hurt anybody, anymore.”
“Hnnnnn,” Zoe groaned, managing to get back on both feet again.
The Manifestation knelt next to Sung-ho’s chair, its needle-tipped and razorbladed claws stacked on top of Sung-ho’s flesh-and-blood fingers. The sharps dug in, drawing blood, ready to drag trenches through Sung-ho’s hand. “All you have to do is have a drink or ask for a cigarette,” the Manifestation said, sounding almost-but-not-quite like Jill. “And then Sung-ho won’t get his hand sliced apart today.”
Zoe stared.
“Just ask for a cigarette. I can get you a light.”
She lurched toward her gun. Two feet away? Four. After moving two feet, she knew she still had two more to go. A Zippo hung in one palm. She dropped it clattering across the black.
“Make a choice, Zoe. Five…”
Wincing as she bent over, she grabbed her pistol; stood despite the headrush.
“Four…”
She turned. Saw that Sung-ho sat directly between her and the kneeling Manifestation. Saw that she didn’t have a sightline for attack at all. She either had to concede or…what? Shoot Sung-ho?
“Three…”
She dropped the gun. Her knees gave out.
“Fuck you,” someone said.
Zoe blinked.
Jill stood in a threshold of light, curls of crimson wrapping her whole left side, left wrist bent wrongways, bruises all over her, clutching a shard of broken mirror in her right fist. When the Manifestation turned toward her, she shuffle-stepped into the room.
“I said ‘fuck you.’”
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September 8, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty, Pt. 2
In the small cabin built above the Malleus safehouse, Omar and Zoe sat in fold-out chairs at a fold-out table and Leo leaned against the kitchen counter, fingers steepled in front of his lips. After a prolonged, serious silence, he lowered his hands. “You’ve killed five operatives.”
“Four,” Zoe corrected.
“Plus the man in the basement,” Leo replied.
“He can still be processed.”
“By who?”
Zoe stared at her empty plate, not wanting to look at either of her companions.
Leo sighed. “The police are out in force. There’s CCTV footage of you—blurry, but existent. Our Conceal and Coverage department won’t even touch it. Touching it would be the same as admitting our involvement to the Consortium, which, needless to say, we cannot do.”
Zoe nodded.
“With everything that’s happened…on paper, we’ve scuttled your insertion op into the Winters team. You’ll be expected to extract within forty-eight hours.”
“I can’t leave her.”
Leo folded his hands in his lap. He considered his shoes and sighed again. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe we have much of a choice.”
“I can’t,” she peered over at him. “I—”
“Promised?” Leo wondered. “Maybe you did. Even so, with real police looking for an armed woman who murdered four Jane and John Does, and with the Consortium searching for someone to blame, someone to punish, it would be suicidal to continue.”
A steaming pause followed. Omar glanced at her in his periphery, a look that meant stop. She worked her jaw. “They killed a child. They’ve killed two children.”
“What happened was tragic, we can all admit that, but they didn’t kill—”
“They did!”
“From an evidential perspective, they didn’t.”
“We know better.”
“They couldn’t have known that the girl would’ve been in the same car,” Leo said. “They couldn’t have even known that the accident would be fatal.”
“Bullshit.”
“Even if they were good enough practitioners to make it likely to be fatal—”
“They wanted him dead and he died! And Altan, and Clarissa, all of them!” she stood with her shout. “And I…”
“Wanted the same experience for them?”
She glowered. “I’m getting her out of there.”
“Even if you succeed, Malleus can’t help you. You’ve lost all coverage—if Jill escapes, now, there won’t be any doubt as to who ran the operation to rescue her. Even if Winters-Armitage was cooperating with us, I doubt we could hide you. Or that the Board would want to.”
Zoe blinked, losing heat. She sank back down in her seat.
(the only way Leo’s cover story works is if you fail)
Leo stepped away from the countertop and straightened up. “I’m sorry, Zoe. I really am. Even after Jill defected to Winters, I still…” he searched for whatever combination of words he needed but couldn’t find them. He trailed off, glanced at the floor, and continued. “I wish this could’ve ended another way.”
“It still could. We have a plan.”
Leo looked at her piteously. It hurt more than the earlier anger or detached pseudo-sadness. “If you’re caught—when you’re caught, either by agents of the Consortium or by proper police—the Belgian will have you black-bagged. The Board doesn’t want to start a war, so they won’t protect you.”
“A war between two organizations of our size could be a threat to Secrecy,” Zoe said, a surge of idea energy thrumming through her. “You could use that argument to back the Belgian down.”
Leo stared, still piteous.
Zoe deflated, realizing. “But nobody wages real war, anymore. It’ll be guerrilla and hidden, secret assassinations and dozens of covens working on hexes and luck magic, curses and psychic invasions, unsolved mysteries and invisible vectors of attack.”
“Stock market movements, too,” Leo added. “Financial pressures, corporate espionage, a search for evidence that our manufacturing or training contracts with the DoD are for some reason void—or worse, evidence that we’re not upholding our end.”
“‘O brave new world,’” Zoe muttered.
“I’m sorry,” Leo repeated. “And while I know it’s not much consolation, I can at least guarantee the lives of Jill and her…”
“Remaining children,” Zoe said.
Leo nodded.
Omar leaned forward, shaking his head. Leo took a breath and stepped toward the door.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this. We’ll expect to see both of you in forty-eight hours. Until then…until then remember that our work, to the best of our abilities, is aimed toward ensuring that one day we will all live in a safer and more just world.”
“When?” Zoe asked. “When do we get that world?”
“I wish I had an answer to give you,” Leo replied.
And then he left.
For a long time she and Omar just sat there. They moved—fidgeted, really—but didn’t speak. Their eyes wandered near each other but never to each other. Eventually, chest tight and hollow, burdened by too much silence and thought, Zoe stood up.
“You know,” Omar said, “there are only five people in that house, now.”
Zoe turned toward him. “You’re—you’re serious?”
“I didn’t come all this way to leave.”
“Last night you said—”
“Yeah, ‘cause you snapped and fucking killed four people.”
Zoe winced.
“I’ve been in this shit for ten years and I’ve only ever had to kill six people. Even that, even that—Jesus. I never thought. But…” he didn’t look at her, he looked straight ahead, breathing against something inside of him he didn’t want to come out. One last long inhalation seemed to settle him. “But your sister shouldn’t run out of options just because of what you did.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, I don’t. But I don’t have to stand by and watch, either.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, yet. If shit goes wrong, you’re still taking the heat.”
Zoe nodded. “Of course.”
Omar stood, finally making eye contact. “You were right.”
“About?”
“The floor and the walls and the ceiling. The dead ends. The maze where the light has to hit things just right for any of it to make sense. And we’re running, now. We’re being chased. I just hope this fuck-up doesn’t shred us.”
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September 7, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty, Pt. 1
At the top of the stairwell, they took the blind corner opening into the lounge and half-bath limping. In the closing darkness, Zoe heard the bathroom door bang open and something multi-limbed and fast scurry out. Turning to track the Manifestation, Zoe saw its narrow limbs cling spider-like to the wall, saw the monster scuttle up to the ceiling insectoid and chitinous. Its limbs curled beneath it and shivered, taut.
It erupted through the air bullet-fast and slammed Sung-ho into the wall. Framed photos crashed to the floor. It recoiled from him, grabbed his half-bent body, and slammed it into the wall again. As Sung-ho dropped to his hands and knees, Zoe pushed Jill ahead and reached for her knife.
Jill tumbled and crashed. The Manifestation blurred past Zoe; Zoe leapt back from clawing limbs and drew her blade.
The Manifestation plucked up Jill easily, twisting one arm behind her back and pulling her close. The monster’s other bladed hand gripped the back of Jill’s neck, needletips and razor edges poised to pierce skin.
Zoe pointed the knife at the creature. Behind her, Sung-ho grunted himself upright again.
The Manifestation titled its head, craned low so its distorted features mirrored Jill’s. A film of something greasy flicked across its all-white eyes. It pushed Jill forward and took a step. Zoe countered, stepping away.
If she’d gone for her gun, instead…
“What is it waiting for?” Sung-ho murmured, inches behind her.
The realization filled Zoe like a heave of air after panicked strangulation. The Manifestation hadn’t neutralized Jill because it couldn’t. Maybe it couldn’t kill any of them. At least not yet. Whatever victory conditions existed for the Manifestation to meet, it needed Jill to survive until it met them.
“When I move, cover me,” Zoe whispered.
Sung-ho grunted in the affirmative.
The Manifestation read the epiphany in Zoe’s stance. It charged forward using Jill as a human shield and Zoe backed up away from it. It spun, its back to the darkened lounge, and grinned a face-splitting, shark-toothed grin at Zoe.
It threw Jill aside with so much force that she toppled over a lounge chair and ragdolled across the floor. She screamed, something broken, and groaned in the vague dimness outside of Zoe’s sight. Zoe swiped her knife and the Manifestation recoiled. Jill panted, shuffling in the background, impossible for Zoe to see clearly. She hit the ground again with a yelp, putting too much weight on whatever bone had come apart in her tumble of impacts.
The Manifestation rolled a series of ticks against the roof of its mouth.
Almost at once, they charged each other.
Zoe and the Manifestation met in a clash of sharps. Zoe swatted aside the monster’s first blow. The second peeled material from her armor and scored the shirt underneath—but it left the creature’s guard open. Zoe buried her combat knife in the side of the thing’s neck and white foam bubbled up from the wound. The Manifestation hissed, cracking Zoe in the gut with an elbow. The knife tore free, serrated edge ripping flesh on its way out. More bubbling froth poured from the creature’s throat. It backpedaled.
Sung-ho opened fire. Four bullets, alternating armor piercing and frangible, howled through the Manifestation’s mass. Grease and tar slopped on the floor; foam gushed and sizzled. Zoe prepared to run for Jill, expecting the Manifestation to blur into the darkness again.
But even as Sung-ho fired a fifth and six shot—it didn’t. It jerked and spasmed, taking the bullets, and more viscous and frothing fluids spattered the hardwood. A seventh round pierced it and it half-collapsed, limp from the waist up, its torso folded down in a tangle. Sung-ho stopped firing, halfway through the extended mag. His back pressed to the wall, he stepped sideways toward Zoe. Liquid poured out of the Manifestation.
Zoe could hear Jill get to her feet in the darkness beyond their enemy, but couldn’t see her.
The butane hiss in the walls grew to a frenzy. It dopplered and multiplied, becoming again a crowd of whispers. Sung-ho jumped as the plaster behind him flexed and oozed. The voices mingled in a wheezy snarl, something maybe-recognizable as laughter if laughter came from a squeezebox.
Slowly, Zoe reached down to sheath her knife and draw her pistol instead.
“Where do you think you are?” the not-Jill voice asked from every direction.
Zoe hesitated.
“We need to get to Jill’s room,” Sung-ho muttered, just a few inches away. “Now.”
“We didn’t summon a Manifestation,” Zoe said, realizing.
“No shit. Even more reason to move before—”
A series of cracks rattled the Manifestation back upright, its shattered bones renewed and its wounds sealed shut. It grinned its sharkmouth grin at them.
Sung-ho grabbed Zoe’s arm, turned toward Jill’s bedroom, and started running.
They didn’t have a chance.
Zoe’s rebel smoke hadn’t changed the nature of the villain because it hadn’t changed the nature of the spell—all she’d done was make it stronger. Because the Confrontation didn’t happen on the material plane. It happened in the magic, in the spell, itself, and in the war raging inside Jill’s mind. They hadn’t brought the Manifestation into their world, they had entered its world.
Then they’d hurt it. An entity built out of manifested trauma. And trauma feasted on pain.
The floor ripped apart, wood trying to move like a wave. Splinters sprayed the air. Tumbling forward, Zoe and Sung-ho shielded their heads. They landed on ragged, uneven boards, sticks and sharp debris angling up at every direction. Zoe had her feet, first, and grabbed Sung-ho’s offered arm as he pushed himself from all-fours to upright.
“How could you do this to me!?” the Manifestation shrieked.
The outside-facing, boarded-windowed wall next to them unraveled. It exploded in slow motion, shards and detritus melting into thick semi-liquid. The structure crashed and whiteheaded, unfolding to become a rocky beach. Heroin shores lapped a short, sharp cliff. A butane flame hissed in the sky.
The new light spilling down from the butane sun made it easier to see, giving them thirty feet of clear vision in any direction. They didn’t like what they saw.
To their left, the first bedroom door broadened and stretched. Before them, the shattered field of corridor elongated. Jill’s room fled toward the horizon, no longer twenty feet away over hardwood but much farther, from light into dimness, over rubble and wreckage.
“We can still make it,” Zoe said, maneuvering the span of obstacles.
“Not if it catches up.”
“It’s blowing through resources.”
“It has a lot of them.”
“We don’t know that.”
Sung-ho snorted. “How many times has it sent Jill to rehab?”
A spike of wood erupted from the ground inches in front of them, stabbing air. Zoe leapt back more from shock than reflex. Sung-ho reared up, cursing. Losing balance, he used his momentum to whirl himself around it. On the other side, a second lance speared up from the ground, as well. Sung-ho made the least flattering sound Zoe had yet heard him make.
“Okay,” Zoe admitted, “it has a lot of resources.”
“Don’t touch the beach.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because it wants us to.”
“But the beach doesn’t have spikes,” Zoe said.
“We don’t know what the beach has.” Sung-ho pursed his lips, brow creased with his own considerations. He muttered something in Korean and shook his head. Muttered something else that sounded like a curse. “We have to try for Jill’s room.”
Zoe squinted behind them. “We have to try for Jill.”
“We have to try for Jill,” Sung-ho agreed.
“Into the breach, then.”
“Into the breach.”
The enormous bedroom door next to them swung in all-at-once. The Manifestation grabbed Sung-ho by his gunhand and his collar and wrenched him into the dimness beyond. Sung-ho shouted something that echoed into senselessness—how big was the room beyond that threshold?—and Zoe froze with a mouth gaping in soundless scream.
She rushed after Sung-ho.
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September 2, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nineteen, Pt. 3
Sirens rose up in the distance. The Belgian’s coven drove their getaway SUV northwestward, away from the scene of the pile-up and the two cemeteries and their own gruesome handiwork. Zoe swerved around the wreck and followed.
“What the fuck happened here!?” Omar shouted in her ear.
She ripped the earbud free and tossed it. The engine snarled. She swerved into the oncoming lane to pass someone, swerved back, and blared her horn at the truck she’d almost crashed into. She caught up to the SUV in twelve seconds. More shouting crackled through the earbuds. She ignored it.
“You don’t think that anybody can touch you,” she muttered, glaring through the windscreen. She tightened gloved hands on the steering wheel, moved halfway back into the oncoming lane to pull up alongside the SUV. “Well, then.”
She jerked the steering wheel and ran the side of her sedan into the side of the SUV. Her sideview mirror fractured apart. The SUV swerved, overcorrected, and overcorrected again. Gaining speed, Zoe swung the rear of her car into the front of theirs. They spun, tires keening. Zoe hit the brakes and turned, not wanting to lose them.
Horns roared. Both vehicles almost collided with traffic.
They recovered first, heading down a side street. Zoe followed, catching another horn blare from whomever she’d almost hit.
The road deteriorated beneath them. Asphalt cracked and potholed until the whole stretch became half-rubble. Another graveyard appeared up ahead on the left, fenced in. On the right, a row of rundown houses kept nearly no windows open to face the dead.
Zoe rode up on the sidewalk. The engine gnashed and growled, bringing her back alongside the SUV.
This time she didn’t let up. She slammed her car into theirs and kept the wheel turned in and the accelerator on the floor. Stuck together by inertia and violent stubbornness, they crashed through the chain link fence and jumped and bucked over crumbling tombstones. The grave markers exacted their revenge even as they broke apart, splintering chassis and smashing windscreen, tearing up the undersides of both vehicles. Finally, the SUV crumpled against a broad-bole’d tree. Zoe’s car slid, two tires popped, axles demolished, until it came to a stop against a tall tower of white stone, totaled. She unbuckled her seat belt, pushed her door open, and sagged out into the grass.
She’d gotten cut up in the rush. Bright red blood trickled down one side of her face and thinner tributaries curled around her left arm. Her bones ached from the shuddering, rumbling chassis and the half-dozen jumping impacts, and numberless bruises promised to swell across her body soon enough. Heaving herself to her feet with a groan, she reached back into the car and grabbed her submachine gun.
She didn’t wait for signs of life.
Approaching the crumpled SUV, she emptied the first mag in a series of three- to five-round bursts. She fired through the windshield, the passenger side door, and the passenger side window. Ejecting the first mag, she grabbed a replacement from her tac pack and reloaded. Crimson sprays slicked the interior of the vehicle. Airbags sagged, burst apart. Whoever sat in the passenger seat slumped over motionless.
Zoe moved in an arc around the side of the vehicle and poured most of her second magazine through the front passenger door and window. She didn’t bother counting bullets or managing bursts, she just squeezed the trigger until the recoil jumped her aim and then released it just long enough to realign her sights.
Nothing inside the vehicle stirred.
The rest of her second mag went through the rear passenger door. The first couple bursts of her third and final mag, too. After that, she continued her arching path around the rear of the SUV. She rattled more bullets through the trunk on her way to the driver’s side of the wreck. Turning the corner, she found the back driver’s side door hanging open.
Lacey crawled through the grass just a few yards away. Considering the compound fracture spiking through one of her legs, she’d made it pretty far. Zoe noted the woman’s location, turned back to the SUV, and ducked inside.
A man she didn’t recognize sprawled on the floor between front and back seats. A crack in his skull rivered red, and a scattering of small bulletholes drooled it. His half-lidded eyes seemed semi-conscious. Wheezy breaths came through fluid-filling lungs.
Zoe’s submachine gun roared and the wheezing stopped.
She’d miscounted bullets. Her last mag empty, she slung the weapon over her shoulder and drew her sidearm to replace it.
Lacey crawled, panting and gore-streaked. With only three good limbs, she wasn’t making it far. Zoe caught up to her in seconds. Lacey must have heard the approach because she turned over, holding a hand up as if the meat of her palm could protect the meat of her face. “Please, wait—”
Zoe shot her in the forehead.
When Lacey went limp on the grass, Zoe fired four more times. Lacey’s skull was a broken bowl spilling.
Another chorus of sirens rose up.
A sudden surge of vomit filled Zoe’s throat. She caught it in her mouth and palm, smearing chunks of it around her lips and chin as she swallowed the rest. Her heart hammered her ribs into piano keys. She couldn’t breathe. She had to make sure to contain the vomit. Her DNA tracked back to yet another person who wasn’t really her, but fabbing a DNA background was expensive and time consuming. She had to make sure.
She’d had to make sure.
She stumbled over a tombstone and caught herself halfway to the ground. A couple stray plops of ejecta tumbled into the grass. Straightening out, she peered over at her demolished car. The distant sirens grew closer. Dizziness swirled around her; she felt herself detach almost physically from the world.
Omar’s sedan rolled through the hole in the chain link fence. The man himself spilled out in a run, reaching for Zoe yards before he could touch her. “We gotta go!” he shouted, sprinting. “We gotta—” He slowed, face twisting, brow trenched, mouth curled open in shock. “What the—what the fuck did you do?”
Zoe stared at him, answerless.
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September 1, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nineteen, Pt. 2
It looked like Jill if Jill had skin the shade of heroin dust and wore slops of tar and grease as clothing. It looked like Jill if some crazed sorcerer had taken Jill and stretched her out, if someone had elongated her five-foot-four frame into a warped six-foot-five. It looked like Jill if Jill had clawed fingers and all-white eyes and hair that bubbled and sizzled and fell out in gobs on the floor.
(underneath everything there’s just—)
Zoe and Sung-ho drew their sidearms and—
All the candles and candelabra went out. In the distant rest of the house, Zoe heard light bulbs bursting. Everything plunged to darkness, night sight invocations giving them the barest six-foot dim to make sense from. Muzzle flares strobed the room as Zoe and Sung-ho opened fire. In the microsecond flashes, Zoe saw this newborn Manifestation haul her sister to her feet.
“Hold!” she shouted, grabbing Sung-ho’s arm and pushing it down.
Sung-ho didn’t need further explanation. He followed the movement of his arm back to the floor, kneeling, and pressed his palms against the sigil-painted hardwood. His lips moved in inaudible syllables.
Zoe charged. If she could press the barrel of her gun against the monster maybe she could—
The plan died before any part of it hatched. In the second between seeing the creature hoisting her sister up and reaching the place where it had happened, the Manifestation had disappeared. Only Jill remained, lips peeling dry and hair splayed radial around her slack, unconscious face.
“We got a problem!” she shouted, louder than was necessary.
Tactical math flashed through her mind; the time it would take Sung-ho to cast a cantrip, the speed the Manifestation must move at—if it used traditional forms of locomotion at all, and the size and dimensions of the ritual space.
She spun around to rush back to Sung-ho and found the Manifestation standing two feet away.
Drops of diamorphine and oozing tar dripped off of her. It. Standing so close, Zoe noticed a pinprick of iris and pupil in the vast milky sclera of its gaze. Needletips and razor edges tipped its fingers.
It stepped forward and she stepped back.
With a breath, she brought her sidearm to bear and opened fire. The first two bullets blew through the Manifestation and—
suddenly the monster was inside her guard, too close to evade, and it swiped razor-needle claws across her armor. Supernaturally enhanced, the sharps shred through layers of knife-resistant material. Zoe backpedaled, firing once blindly, and parried the next blow with a forearm. Its third strike glanced her, stripping more protection from her body. She managed to get the barrel pointed at its center mass and squeezed the trigger. Another blare of flashbulb and thunder cracked between them.
The Manifestation bled into the darkness almost too fast to see.
Sung-ho finished the invocation. A surge of energy filled Zoe, sizzling between muscle fibers and along tendon and ligament. Mystic reinforcement buttressed her bones and wired her together. Strength bolstered her.
“Here!” she called out, moving the few feet of darkness between herself and Jill.
“It’s too dark,” Sung-ho said, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his gunhand. “We need flashlights.”
“Where are they?” Zoe asked.
Sung-ho paused. “I—I don’t know.”
“We have to move her,” Zoe said.
“What happened?” Sung-ho indicated the rips in her armor.
“The Manifestation. It’s still here somewhere.”
Sung-ho turned to scan the room. With their limited vision, they couldn’t make out more than a third of the chamber at a time. His grip tightened on his sidearm and stepped backwards, closer to Zoe.
“If we hurry, we can get her upstairs.” Zoe shoved her sidearm back in its holster.
“Alright, let’s go.” Sung-ho holstered his own pistol and bent to grab Jill’s legs. “Fast.”
They hauled Jill up and staggered out of the room. Whispers hissed in from the walls, countless voices rasping phlegmatic at them, the words too garbled and overlapped to make out individual sentences. Magic thickened the air, humming, and all the tiny hairs on their bodies bristled in reaction. Zoe backed up toward the kitchen and dining area, her back to the door. In the dimness that should’ve been darkness, neither of them had good sight on the other one’s rear.
They moved as quickly as possible—unfortunately, they were still quite slow.
As they moved through the kitchen, soles over tile, the Manifestation attacked. To Zoe, it seemed to come out of nowhere, emerging from the dimness itself. It crashed into Sung-ho’s side and threw him onto the eat-in table. Jill dropped and Zoe stumbled backward. Sung-ho unsheathed a combat knife and sliced at nothing. Zoe lost her grip on Jill and tripped. She bounced off of the refrigerator and reached for her own knife sheath.
The Manifestation jittered, one moment at the eat-in table and the next just a foot from Zoe. Reverse-gripped, Zoe brought the sharp, serrated edge of a combat knife across the Manifestation’s chest. Foamy whiteness bubbled up from the wound. Before she could strike again, the Manifestation had her throat in one hand, her wrist in another. Zoe slammed into the fridge again, this time hard enough to hurt. With all the wards and invocations protecting them, the pain meant something. Her spine had cratered the side of the appliance.
Zoe’s off-hand shot up to grab the limb attached to her neck. She dug her nails into not-skin skin. One of the needletip-claws not-yet-cutting her shivered. It extended, the tip pressing into flesh, piercing it. Zoe kicked at her assailant’s legs and tried to pry its grip away from her throat.
Two gunshots thundered in the tiny space. Both hit the Manifestation in the back.
The third punctured the fridge, an inch and a half from Zoe’s head. The Manifestation had blurred again, melting back into shadow. Zoe almost lost balance as her feet touched the ground again, the sudden release taking her by surprise. She spun in useless circles, searching.
Sung-ho stepped off the table. “She disappeared.”
“It,” Zoe corrected. “And yes, it did.”
“Don’t you get it yet?” the gravelly, not-Jill voice taunted from inside the walls.
Gritting her teeth, Zoe ignored the question. “We need to move…”
“I’m everywhere,” the voice snarled, playing melody over a hissing symphony of whispers. “Under everything.”
Liquid dripped down from the ceiling. The walls twisted and warped like whorled curtains.
Sheathing his knife and using both hands to grasp his sidearm, Sung-ho moved toward Zoe. “Back to back.”
In formation, they squinted at the darkness. Zoe faced the corridor leading to the stairwell and Sung-ho faced the direction of the ritual space. Neither of them saw very far. Between them, Jill moaned drowsily. Sweat glistened down her face. Her eyeballs rolled beneath their lids; her chapped lips parted in unspoken syllable.
Zoe remembered a seal in Jill’s bedroom, a series of seals and wards Jill had used to lock a heroin kit away from herself. With some salt and a little investment of physical and mental energy, they could recharge and re-trigger it again. “If we can get upstairs, I think we can trap it,” she said.
“Big ‘if,’” Sung-ho replied.
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
They only waited for a second, but it felt much longer in the tense, whisper-static’d space.
Sung-ho lowered his barrel. “Okay. So far it’s only attacked to harry us, maybe we can make it.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that out loud.”
“It’s true whether I say it or not. Faster, this time.”
Jill stirred as they bent to pick her up. “What?” she asked, softly. “What’s going on?”
“Something went wrong,” Zoe said. “We have to get upstairs. Can you get up?”
“We have to hurry,” Sung-ho added.
Jill pushed herself up slowly, muscle-less and attenuated. “What happened?”
“We don’t have time to explain. The seals and wards in your room, are they still there?”
“They’re out of charge, but the sigils are still there…”
“We have to get to your room.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“There’s a monster,” Sung-ho answered. “We don’t know more than that.”
“Is it—is it my fault?” Jill seemed woozy, bleary-eyed.
“I don’t know,” Zoe said. “And it doesn’t matter. Come on.”
She took Jill’s arm and looped it across her shoulders. Sung-ho withdrew his sidearm. Tight-knit, they moved slowly down the dim hallway for the stairwell. They passed an intersection between foyer and bathroom and kept going. A choir of hisses garbled up from the hardwood. The walls moved like flexing muscles. Drips plopped down from the ceiling, heroin and morphine.
They started up the stairs.
Turn Back
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